


Nora, Not Scared

by JaqofSpades



Category: Revolution (TV)
Genre: Community: heroinebigbang, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-13
Updated: 2015-06-14
Packaged: 2018-04-04 05:16:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 11
Words: 38,503
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4126687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JaqofSpades/pseuds/JaqofSpades
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"She’s the bombmaker.  The one they call in when the odds are stacked against them.  Calm and competent, pure, relentless focus.  She reaches, takes what she needs, one last time.  Nora, not scared."  </p><p>When the lights went out in 2012, Nora Clayton had been blowing things up in the lab as part of her doctoral program.   Sixteen years later, she lays dying in a world ripped apart by violence and chaos.  She has been part of the problem, fought to find a solution, and will die as she lived - brave, stubborn, and vaguely pissed off at her own inability to let go of Miles Matheson.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. September 2027

**Author's Note:**

> Nora was my favorite character on Revolution right from moment we met her. One of the reasons Revolution fans are so conflicted about the series is how it breathed life into these marvelous, fully fleshed characters, then abandoned them to plot holes and unsolved mysteries. Nora, being female and brown, was always the most likely character to get Kripked for someone's manpain, and sure enough, she died in the season finale without us ever having the chance to know her properly, know how a beauty queen became a bounty hunter and a bombmaker, know what it was like being General Matheson's lover during the Philadelphia years, see the hardened bounty hunter reborn as a Rebel.
> 
> This is my love letter to Nora and all those what if's, basically.
> 
> Huge thanks to [BeaRyan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/BeaRyan) for the handholding, cheerleading and characterisation help; [kwritten](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kwritten) did the big read through and told me to get my big girl panties on and tackle the hard stuff. Made of awesome, those two. All mistakes are my own because I am every beta's nightmare, writing and revising right up until the moment I hit post. (And probably after.)
> 
> The beautiful art you'll see throughout was created by Kayla, iwilltry-tocarryon, as part of our participation in the 2015 Heroine Big Bang. She does Nora proud :D

 

  
_September 11, 2027: The Tower, Colorado._

  
The spark licks at the fuse, then catches, the sullen little glow racing along as if desperate for what comes next. Nora licks her lips and lets the anticipation take her. It builds, skittering in her blood and aching in her bones, leaving her entire body heavy with need. Then the blast shudders through her: fulfillment, bliss, salvation. Tantalisingly close, but just out of her reach.

Then she remembers. She’s the bombmaker. The one they call in when the odds are stacked against them. Calm and competent; pure, relentless focus. All she has to do is take what she needs, one last time.

Her ears must still be ringing because she can’t hear them anymore. She tries to shape the words to say goodbye, but her body is too heavy to cooperate.

“Charlie,” she bleeds. “Miles.”

There’s no more pain, she wants to tell them. Love, loss, loyalty - the rabid dogs that have been nipping at her heels for so long are all quiet now.

There’s just this. Flame, fuse, fuel, ignition. So pure. Four, three, two, one … and kaboom.

_They’d been staring into the campfire once, and she’d tried to explain how it made her feel. “It’s not just the explosion,” she’d protested, bridling at the laughter lurking in his black eyes. “It’s what comes after – the fresh start. The blank slate,” she had tried to explain. He’d snorted and called it post-orgasmic bliss, and when she’d told him not everything was about sex, even his fucking eyebrow had looked dubious._

And she can’t remember him, remember them, without admitting that sometimes it had been, he'll always be a fire in her blood, but she's figured it out now. Accepted it, even. Her addiction, her craving had been for something much more profound.

Chaos. Liberation.

Freedom.

_“Is it worth dying for, Nora? You’re really putting your life on the line for these clowns?”_

Not those clowns, in the end.

She can see Charlie’s tear-stained glimmer above her, and feel Miles all around her, and needs them, needs them to know …

It’s too late, so she prays for them. It’s what comes after that counts.

Flame. Fuse. Fuel. Ignition. _Kaboom_.

(She’s not scared.)


	2. September 2012

_September 17, 2012: University of Texas, San Antonio_

Kaboom!

The burning chemical rains down around her, hot, wet patches where it lands on her lab coat, doing its best to sizzle its way through to her skin. She flicks them away absent-mindedly, wishing she thought to wrap her hair, but more worried about the little globules merrily sizzling on the lab ceiling, tiny glowing galaxies that were going to get her in a shitload of trouble. Being Professor Hayden’s favorite grad student only gets her so far when it comes to explosions. But in her defense, the new reagent works way better than either of them had projected.

She finds herself grinning at the thought as she grabs the extinguisher and checks the hazchem rating. Her Frankenblend doesn’t exactly have its own extinguisher, but at a stretch, halon should do. She hopes.

The security guard shoulders his way into the room just after she manages to knock the last of the glowing sludge from the ceiling with a broom, flicking anything still burning into the industrial sink. “All under control, Dan,” she dissembles, seeing his look of shock. “No need to worry the Professor about this.”

“Sorry Missy, I’ve got my orders. Anything goes bang down here, I call her right away. She wasn’t a happy woman.”

Nora winces. Deirdre had been talking about her date all day. Apparently the dating pool dries up the minute you hit 40, and even at 20, Nora had seen how men started to twitch when she dropped the details of her research into the conversation. “And not all of us are beauty queens, darling,” her mentor had grinned toothily.

Not all of us had needed some way to pay for college, Nora had wanted to fire back, but instead forced herself to smile sympathetically. It’s been the same story, just different degrees of cattiness, since she won her first pageant back in grade school. No one had ever asked if she actually wanted to do them.

Mama had opened a bank account for Nora the week after Daddy left, and taught her how to sashay, and smile, and flick her tongue over her lips when she caught the eye of a judge. She’d won her first pageant a month later, and every win since had swollen her college fund just a little bit more. It had been exciting at first, but by the time she’s 15 and has Miss Galveston and Miss San Antonio and Miss Junior Texas to her name, Nora has stopped wondering why they do this when they all hate the pageants so much.

Mama had sat her down and laid it all out when Nora was a sophomore in high school, all cut up about some football player that hadn’t bothered to call.

“He’s not going to call, Nora,” Mama had snapped. “You’re pretty, and you’re smart, but you’ll never be white enough for a boy like that. He’s got a picture in his head, Nora the Beauty Queen, and he’s not interested in whether that’s really you, so best you laugh and move on.”

Her eyes had softened then.“You’ve got two choices, Nora,” she’d said. “You tell people exactly who you are and what it’s like being you, and sure, maybe they understand. But maybe they don’t and they hate you anyway, and you’ve given them everything they need to take you down. Or, you smile real pretty, and maybe flirt a little, and keep your business to yourself. That gives you the advantage because they’re not seeing you - they’re seeing a brainless doll they want to fuck.”

She’d stood there, open-mouthed, as shocked by the naked contempt in her mother’s voice as she was the vulgarity. It was her first inkling that sweet, shy Mama wasn’t exactly what she seemed. Later, she hears about El Salvador, and the pretty teenager who found herself caught up in a vicious guerilla war; “and no matter how you feel about your Dad leaving, Nora, remember - he got me out. And I will be forever grateful for that - and you should be too. You and Mia both.”

Nora hadn’t really understood what Mama had meant until she’d done some reading on the war fought by women and girls in El Salvador. It had sent her into shock, and suddenly, the beauty pageant circuit was just another Devil’s bargain.

_Her lungs scream, the taste of blood in her mouth barely offensive now. Still, her heart aches for that child. So many bargains along the way. So many devils._

Oh, to grow up white and privileged, Nora thinks sourly before pulling her phone from the pocket of her lab coat to make her own call to Professor Hayden. It hasn’t even rung for two seconds before Deirdre’s anxious voice leaps tinnily from the speaker.

“What did you DO?”

“Put it this way - the new reagent works really well. But it was a very small explosion, Deirdre. And it’s all out now,” Nora rushes to explain, throwing the fire blanket over the last, flickering remnants of burning goo on the floor.

“Damage?”

“Maybe a little staining on the ceiling. But otherwise, not even a broken pipette.”

Not that you’ll find, anyway.

“So I don’t need to come in?”

“Nah. Enjoy your date. You won’t even notice anything’s different on Monday - ‘cept maybe the floor will be cleaner.”

“Well that’s a bonus.” The buzz of conversation at the other end of the line grew suddenly fainter, as if Deirdre had walked away from the crowd. “He’s a Marine,” she confided in a delighted whisper, and for the first time, Nora didn’t know what to say.

Congratulations? I’m sorry? Whatever you do, keep him away from the whiskey?

“Just … be careful. Marines can be a little dictatorial,” she murmurs, hoping she isn’t cautioning her friend away from the sweetest man alive. Just because her Dad hadn’t been able to cut it in civilian life didn’t mean they were all like that, Nora reminds herself.

Not that she’ll ever give herself the chance to find out. Nora Cruz Clayton is officially a military-free zone. She likes her men soulful and compliant, the type who will write songs about her beauty and never hog the remote, she’s decided. A degree of sensitivity is an acceptable tradeoff for a hard body poisoned by too much testosterone, she tells herself, and every now and then actually finds someone who manages to convince her of that. Mostly, though, she just stays single.

Hey, at least this way I’m cleaning up after myself and not someone else, Nora sighs as she locks up the lab on her way out. Deirdre is rambling about how the guy seems quite smart, and they’d actually been talking about books and movies and the type of music they liked.

“Let me guess, Led Zeppelin,” Nora interjects, making Deirdre sputter on the other end of the line, astonished.

“How the hell did you know that?”

Nora just laughs, and figures her friend will eventually figure it out. Men were such caricatures sometimes.

“Gotta go, D. Promised Mia I’d help her with her homework before bed, and it’s getting late. Have fun.”

She hasn’t lied, exactly, but the less Deirdre knows about how much time she puts into cleaning the ceiling, the better. Nora glances anxiously at her phone as she makes her way across the carpark, knowing she’s long missed dinner and her stroppy little sister will be pissed.

She’s calling home to tell them she’s on her way when the signal starts to fade in and out, then vanishes. She hits redial, but it never connects.

And then her car rolls to a stop in the middle of Connally Loop, lights, engine, everything just gone. She climbs out to check the battery, then looks around to see half a dozen people doing exactly the same thing.

Most, though, are staring up at the sky, and she barely has time to think “what?” before the burning debris starts to rain down. 

  
*  


_But that wasn’t how it went, Nora frets. Wet, sticky fire cascading down around her - that was the lab. The planes had simply fallen out of the sky, dark spiralling doom. The explosions had come when they started to break up, vomiting aviation fuel over the trees and houses and cars in their path. The people._

_She’d made it under her car before the first big boom - maybe someone had been smoking a cigarette, or maybe it was just friction. All she remembers is the sucking rush of it, the air vanishing and then the inferno blasting past, the car above her suddenly superheated, and tongues of flame licking at her, then gone._

_One-one hundred, two-one hundred, three … she’d made it to five before she’d given into to her need to know what had happened, crawling out to see - nothing that made sense. Chaos. Mangled things in twisted wreckage that she wouldn’t have picked for human if it hadn’t been for the sullen glow of bone through charred flesh._

_“What happened?” she had called out to the man leaning against the car next to her, still staring upwards. It’s not until she wipes the tears out of her eyes that she sees the shiny spear pinning him to his car, his belly a glistening mass of ruined intestines and scrap metal._

_The front of the car is staved in by something huge and smoldering, but she’d remembered the babble of young voices from the back, and raced to pull open the rear doors. There’d been three of them, a boy and a girl around Mia’s age and a much littler one, still in her carseat._

_Her teddy bear fell out onto the road when Nora pried open the door, and she had picked it up slowly and brushed it off, ignoring the sooty smear of burnt fur under her hand. It was as dead and charred as the little girl herself, and all Nora could do for them was to tuck it back in her chubby little arms, and offer a wretched Hail Mary in apology, too shocked to cry, or even be sick. Death had been such a stranger, then._

_Is it a friend, now? Certainly a passing acquaintance, Nora smiles, and feels her head roll back over Miles’ arm. An unwanted ex, maybe. That one you never get past._

_“Nora, no,” Charlie begs, and something wet falls on her face. Miles is crying. The dick. It shouldn’t be the first time, not with the life they’ve lived. The things they’ve lost and thrown away._

_“Mia,” Nora moans, and wonders if her sister’s name will be her last word. It feels like a fresh betrayal, her need to tell Miles that she loves him, that she chose him. But she needs to see Mia, needs to ask her why, and get her to Dad’s … Nora groans as she remembers Mama is still face down on the bed in the other room, her thighs still bloody from what they’d done to her, and she can’t let Mia see that. Can’t let Mia know how things are falling apart, how ugly it’s got … she’s just a kid, for Christ’s sake. Just a kid._

  
*  


The house is dark when she finally limps through the front door. Panic jangles around the edges of her vision, and she jeers at herself for giving in to the paralyzing dread that’s been stalking her through three hours of hell on earth. She’s made it home. She’s safe. She knows where the candles are. Just get on with it Nora, she thinks, and forces one foot in front of the other for the last few feet of her journey. Find the matches, fill the place with enough light to chase away all the shadows, and then she can think about Mom and Mia.

Nora rifles through the utensil drawer, muttering a prayer of thanks as she finds the tall, white candles Mama likes to burn in the evenings, setting one in the holder on the table, then fishing out the matches that sit next to the ancient gas stove. Her hands shake as she tries to light it, her mind already terrifying her with the implications of the empty house. It’s Monday. Mom would have left work by five, her fact-obsessed brain insists on pointing out. Mia’s gymnastic class should have been done by six. Of course they’re out there somewhere. Squashed flat by something that had fallen from the sky, or a truck that had too much momentum to stop. Cowering in a burning street.

Horrified, awful tears well in her eyes, and she curses her shaky hands, and the dud matches, and the wick that won’t catch. And the moron who crashed into whatever it was that blacked out her entire neighborhood. Or maybe - she remembers the planes, and how it felt the sky itself was falling - this is some sort of terrorist attack, an entire power station that’s been taken out somewhere, though she can’t for the life of her figure out how -

She can’t think about it, Nora gasps as she sink to her knees in the darkness. All she can do is pray - _padre nuestro, que estes en el cielo, sanctificado sea tu nombre_ \- and try again when her eyes aren’t so full of tears, when her hands can hold the match without killing the flame.

Somewhere, the Devil is playing his fiddle and screaming with glee, Nora despairs, and ye Gods, could she be any more dramatic in her self-pity? In her defense, it’s been a truly fucking awful day, Nora thinks viciously as she makes a second attempt at lighting the candle. It catches, and the golden glow helps, a little. Mia and Mom will make it home tomorrow, she tells herself, and the power will probably come back on before then. It just feels like the end of the world.

And then the hand falls on her shoulder.

Nora throws herself at the knife block, then wheels on her attacker with the butcher’s knife extended in shaking hands. She drops it with a cry of relief when her mother’s face looms out of the half-dark, hands too busy snuffing the candle to defend herself. “Silencio, mija,” she whispers, the words drifting in the dark. “No estamos aqui.”

They need to be ghosts, she whispers as they move up the stairs. It had started two hours after the power went out. Gonzales from the apartments next door had come knocking first, then Tony Arucchio. 

“They’re just being good neighbours, Mama! They know it’s just the three of us, they want to see you’re okay,” Nora protests, but her stomach knows better, lurching into a slow, sickening roll as if to spite her. Why those two? She’s avoided Tony Arucchio since he stuck his hand up under her skirt in high school, and Gonzales - Mama had taken his wife to the emergency room more than once.

“They look at us and see women alone,” Mama says bluntly. She opens the door to her bedroom and ushers Nora inside, Mia barely stirring under the Justin Bieber quilt she’s dragged in from her own room. Nora had teased her mercilessly about that quilt, telling her she was too young to be acting like a silly teenager, and Mia had stomped away furiously, muttering that eleven was almost a teenager anyway. Now all she can think is how little she looks, not a woman, not even vaguely.

But Nora is 20, not 12, and knows how the world works. She was Mia’s age when they started whistling at her, and within the year, grown men were following her home. She’d worn her clothes baggy, and never answered back, and thought if only they knew she was a nice girl, they’d leave her alone. They hadn’t.

She’s not sure why the power going out should make things seem so much more dire: if she’s honest, it’s a reality they’ve lived with ever since Dad left. Maribel Cruz, her mama liked to point out, wasn’t raising fools. They weren’t prone to flights of the imagination, either, so when her skin prickled and her gut lurched, Nora had learned to listen. And she had felt the threat out there, slinking through the darkness beside her as she fought her way home through streets that had once been familiar.

And every day that passes without the electricity coming back on, it only gets worse. Mama spends a whole night staring at the ceiling on day three, and on day four, the lessons begin.

Nora and Mia look at each other, agog, as their mother drills them on how to forage for supplies, and how to have hands so light no one ever suspects they’ve been robbed. How to hold a knife, and throw it accurately enough to kill someone. Common household ingredients that can be used as poison, or a booby trap, or a quick, dirty bomb.

How to pick the weakest man in a crowd, and the strongest. How to bend either of them to your will.

Mama keeps her voice flat and strong as she shares her secrets. “These are things I’d hoped you’d never need to know,” she smiles sadly, and “you’ll need to look after each other, querida.”

Nora can’t ask why; she knows her mother would never leave them, and the only other answer is unbearable. Mama has the knives from the kitchen hidden all over the house; when the looters come calling, they lie still, each gripping a knife.

“This is what happens when things fall apart,” Mama says softly, and there is such knowledge in her eyes, such pain, that Nora starts to shake.

Mama scoops her up, no matter that she’s smaller than Nora is, and they lie on the bed staring at each other. Nora’s face is round with baby fat, and she can’t help but covet the long, elegant oval that frames her mother’s delicate features. Maribel’s cheekbones are so high her eyes tilt upwards, the dark tumble of her hair accentuating their catlike beauty. People tell them they look alike, but Nora can’t see it. Her face is too plump, her breasts too big and her belly less flat, but Mama simply smiles and tells her she’ll grow into herself soon enough.

If we live through this, the terror intrudes, making her breath stop and her eyes fill with tears.

“It’s alright to be scared, Nora. Stupid not to be,” Mama breathes, voice barely breaking the hush as she delivers the words straight to Nora’s ear. “But you’re strong, _mi hija_. Strong and stubborn and so, so clever,” Maribel says, eyes watering for a moment before she blinks them clear. “Use that. Never be afraid to be who you are, or do what you must. It will keep you alive,” she says urgently. “You can’t expect anyone else to do that for you.”

They hole up in the upstairs bedrooms, the curtains drawn and everything they need brought upstairs to maintain the fiction that they’ve abandoned the house. The looting starts as they move into the second week without power; people are running out of food, Mama says sadly. Their house looks long abandoned, though - they make sure of that - and no one has ever made it up the stairs. Then their luck runs out.

“Go hide under the bed,” Mama orders as the sound of heavy boots fills the house, and they flee into Nora’s room, still gaudy with the trinkets of her childhood. They hear a guttural yell, and Nora feels her dread rise up to choke her; her stomach lurches when she hears a crash and a moan that quickly fades to a nightmare of crude taunts. Nora throws her hands over Mia’s ears, but has to rely on the alarmed banging of her outraged heart to drown out the noise.

Time slips into viscous, rubbery loop as they wait for the intruders to take what they want, and move on to the next house. Don’t come out for anything, Mama had drilled them. Wait for me to come and give you the all clear.

But Mama never comes, and Nora knows what that means. She simply needs a moment, a few minutes, the courage to face what she’s going to find in the room down the hall. She steps over the man with the Mama’s knife still sticking out of his chest, already focused on the door a few feet away, Mama’s room, Mama’s bed, Mama a broken doll in the centre of it, legs still askew and her blood soaking into the linens.

“Where’s M ..”

Nora wheels on Mia and pushes her out of the room. “Mom left a note. She’ll meet us at Dad’s. We have to leave, right now,” Nora babbles through numb lips as she grabs them a bag each, and mechanically packs it with water and food and clothes.

She doesn’t bother to lock the door behind them as they leave, simply brushing away their tracks with a bushy branch, the way Mama had taught her. Galveston was a four hour drive, she remembers, straight down the 10, and then through Eagle Lake and Manvel. It takes them week.

And he’s not there.


	3. April 2013

_April 26, 2013: New Orleans, Louisiana._  


Nora crawls through the shrubbery on her belly, gritting her teeth at the brambles tearing her skin, and the knife poking into the small of her back. She’d pulled apart an old handbag she’d found in the street to make a scabbard, but times like these reminded her that sometimes, near enough wasn’t good enough.

Near enough wouldn’t do a damn thing to get Mia back.

They had drifted after Galveston, unable to find anything to eat in the deserted strip of houses along Galveston island. A nice old lady they’d met had been travelling to stay with her granddaughter in Houston, and asked them to keep her company on the trip; Mia had turned hopeful eyes on her, and Nora couldn’t think of one damn reason to say no.

The reason should have been Houston, and the gangs that roamed the streets, taking everything - and anyone - they wanted. Mrs Wilkerson had negotiated ever so politely, offering the boys who called themselves the gatekeepers cash money to let them past; Nora figured the bean salad in her backpack would have been more effective. But the negotiations were doomed the minute they got a look at Nora.

“Give us a BJ each, and we’ll take you straight there ourselves,” the ringleader had said, his matter-of-fact tone making the transaction all the more horrifying. And then he looked at Mia.

“She know how to suck cock yet?”

Nora still remembered the odd move from doing judo as a kid, and had dropped him and planted her knee in his throat when Mrs Wilkerson dragged a Colt 45 out of her oversized purse. She was about to calm the woman when she levelled the gun square in the centre of Nora’s chest.

“Just do as he asks, sweetie. Then I’ll be on my way with the nice boys.”

Mia’s mouth dropped open in horror. She hadn’t reacted at all when the gatekeeper asked about her sexual skills, but betrayal by someone they’d put their trust in was still shocking. Mrs Wilkerson had looked sorry, true, but apparently that wasn’t enough apology for Mia: she had growled like an angry bear cub before swinging one of the machetes they’d found in a barn outside Eagle Lake in a wide arc towards the old woman’s throat. It stopped short before connecting, but kindly Mrs Wilkinson had simply blinked at sweet, unassuming little Mia before sliding to the ground in a dead faint.

Nora and Mia took off at a run, expecting to hear the gatekeeper and his goons pounding after them any minute. But apparently picking over the rich, unconscious old lady seemed a better prospect than stirring themselves to run after two fleet-footed girls.

That had been the easy escape.

They had learned to travel at night, slipping into the scenery whenever anyone approached. The blackness was like nothing they’d ever seen before, total and oppressive, except when the moon was full. And some nights, the darkest ones, the stars were so bright they painted a river of light across the sky, and Mia would spin tales of following it all the way back to Mom, or to wherever Dad was waiting for them.

Instead, Nora uses that spill of light to track the two men who had jumped them when they’d curled up in an abandoned car for the night just outside of Ponchatoula. Nora had been able to fight her way free, but then the skinny little guy had held a knife to Mia’s throat, and Nora had lost the will to fight. She’d dropped the machete, and made to climb back into the rickety little cart, but the vile little man had shoved her to the ground with a snort. 

“Too much trouble and probably too old anyway,” he sneered. “Wouldn’t get two bits for you.” And then he’d slapped the horse into action, leaving Nora screaming inside her skin as her sister was stolen away. Her paralysis lasts only as long as it takes for the unwieldy vehicle to work its way up the next hill, the horses plodding slower than she can jog.

Nora shadowed the cart through the night, her fear for Mia forcing one foot in front of the other for longer than she ever thought she could walk. They rattled into New Orleans with the dawn, making their way through the empty streets to a surprisingly well-kept mansion on the edge of the French Quarter. The ancient trees surrounding the place are draped with Spanish moss, easy to hide in as she watches them pull up on the pebbled drive, but to get closer, she needs to drop to her belly and crawl from one thicket of overgrown shrubs to the next.

She’s close enough to overhear their vile banter as they unload their cargo, dragging Mia out bodily as she clings to the bars of her cage in terror. Do as they say, Nora begs her silently, but Mia never sees the blow coming. 

“That shut the little bitch up,” the older man sneers, and Nora has to breathe her way through the red wash of rage. “Get ‘er cleaned up, and maybe Kitty will let you show ‘er the ropes personally. Bet she ain’t even bleeding yet - sweet little cunt she’ll have,” he says, taking advantage of Mia’s prone position to slide his hand down the gape at the back of her jeans. He waggles his tongue as he mimics licking his hand clean and this, Nora vows, will be the first person she ever kills.

Maybe that’s why she doesn’t hear them coming.

Two men spring out of the undergrowth on either side of her, one a dark, rangy scarecrow, the other shaggy, blonde blur. They’re wearing guns, she catalogues in her shock, but they don’t use them.

They don’t need to.

The blonde guy fells the man she dubbed Ferret Face with a single punch, leaving his dark companion to press Mia’s attacker back into the wall, pinning him there with a casual forearm against his throat.

“How many inside, and where do they keep the kids?” he asks, voice flat as if the whole incident bores him silly. Nora’s not fooled, and the sudden stink of urine suggests his prisoner isn’t either. Tall, dark and scary would rather kill him than put in any effort into making him talk.

Mine, Nora thinks viciously, and bursts into the open to make her claim.

Three sets of eyes fix on her as she stalks forward, knife drawn. The blonde man approaches, wary, but the taller one simply raises an eyebrow and jerks his head towards the cart.

“Yours?”

“My baby sister,” she replies. “He hit her. He _touched_ her.”

His eyes flit to her knife then back to her face, approval tugging at the corner of his mouth. “You can have him when he’s told us where the others are.”

“Others?”

“Bunch of ‘em raided our camp, took six kids. Been tracking ‘em for a week.”

Nora flinches at the thought of six other children at the mercy of predators like this, but Mia is stirring, little whimpers that make her sound like a terrified puppy. Nora moves to the cart and pulls her sister into her arms, making soothing noises and telling her she’s safe. Then her eyes flick back to the two men.

“Make it hurt. But don’t kill him.”

The blood drains from the flesh peddler’s face as the tall man turns back to him, one eyebrow raised in question. “You heard the girl, prick. How much I hurt you before she kills you depends on how helpful you are.”

He squeaks like the rodent he is and starts to gabble, a useless torrent of begging that falls on deaf ears. 

“Yeah, not helpful.” The man’s elbow smashes into his prisoner’s nose, reducing it to a pulp. “Don’t make me use my knife - wanna save that for the kid,” he says, throwing a dark smirk in Nora’s direction.

She has to take a deep breath to rein her need to tell him she’s not a kid. There’s a liquid heat racing through her veins that can’t be what she thinks it is, because … it just can’t be. Mia is hurt, and other children are missing, and she’s not getting off on watching the vicious delight on his face as he beats up the disgusting leech. That’d be sick.

Nora forces her attention back to Mia, who is groaning and trying to focus.

“Nora? You’re here? What -”

“I’ve got you baby. You’re safe. They -”

Mia shrieks and tries to burrow into her body as she notices the two strangers. She peeks out to take a second look, then frowns as she realises they have immobilised the men who stole her.

“Who are they?” she whispers, and Nora has to shake her head.

“No idea. But they want to get their kids back, like I’ve got you,” she explains. “Those guys didn’t say anything that might help?”

“Only —” Mia’s mouth works noiselessly, then her bottom lip starts to wobble as she shudders with silent tears. Nora exchanges a worried look with her new ally, and rubs her sister’s back, unable to find the words that can cancel out this type of horror.

“I’m thinking that means we need to get in there quick,” the blonde man interrupts. “C’mon, Miles!”

His friend shoots her an assessing glance, then nods. “We’ve got this, if you need to go,” he says, and she knows exactly what he’s offering. She doesn’t have to kill this man herself. He’ll die, but it doesn’t have to be at her hand.

Something ugly in Nora’s soul howls at being deprived, but then Mia’s sobs start to dry up. She is beyond terror, her gaze blank as she stares up at the blacked out windows of the beautiful old house. Get the hell out, Nora’s instincts scream. Put your sister first. You don’t have time for dirty little things like vengeance.

Nora tells the two men to get inside with a jerk of her head, then returns her attention to her sister. She cradles Mia in her arms until she stops shaking, then lifts her down from the cart to lead her away from the mansion.

Mia takes two steps, three, then stops. “What if they need help, Nora?”

They don’t need help, she wants to scream. I need you safe. You’re my sister, no one else. But Mia is looking at her as if she’s a monster, and she wonders how many other big sisters are out there, searching desperately for the children they’ve sworn to protect.

“Stay close. Right behind me. And remember - we’re ghosts.”

It’s easy enough to find the stolen children - they drift from room to room, marvelling at the ornate furniture, then step over the corpse at the bottom of the stairs and glide up, thankful for the fight raging several rooms away to conceal their passage. Somewhere, someone is sobbing quietly, and up here, all the rooms are locked. Nora tries to remember her mother’s lesson on how to pick a lock, but in the end, she resorts to trying to kick it open.

It doesn’t work.

“You’re what? 100 pounds soaking wet? Stand back.”

The blonde man throws himself at the door shoulder first as his dark friend swings his way up the stairs, noting their presence with frown before prowling up the corridor to force his way into the next room. Nora looks away to find the man next to her staring helplessly through the broken door at two little girls cowering on the other side of the room. Their fragile little limbs are almost completely exposed in adult-style lingerie, and even the exaggerated features painted onto their faces can’t hide the numbness and shock in their eyes. 

“I’ve got this,” Nora says softly as she registers just how horrified and appalled the blonde man is. “You guys make sure we’re safe, and Mia and I will take care of the kids,” she decides, dismissing him. 

“Yes, ma’am,” he nods, gratitude obvious underneath the sarcasm.

Later, the dark man will introduce himself as Miles Matheson, and his friend, Monroe, as “the soft touch.” Nora wants to point out that Monroe had bashed and stabbed and shot his way through just as many of the mansion’s guards as he had, but then she remembers Matheson’s nod towards the spot they’d first met as they rolled out of the yard. She knows without asking that it’s his way of telling her that the man who had stolen Mia was dead as dead got. “Soft” is obviously a relative concept. 

”What Miles means is that Bass has a heart like ordinary people, while his is a shrivelled up piece of leather,” teases a third man, who’d introduced himself as “Jeremy Baker, getaway driver extrordinaire.”

“Miles told me to hide the wagon in the trees and keep the stupid to a minimum,” he shrugged. “You’re obviously way more badass than me.”

Nora doesn’t feel badass at all. She feels wrecked, and sick to her very soul. Twenty three, they’d found. The youngest four, the eldest fifteen, boys and girls alike. Some are still in the street clothes they’d been stolen in, and others have been there so long they can’t remember where they’d originally been taken from.

“Why are there no cars?” one girl asks as they bump away from the brothel in the overloaded wagon. Nora looks at her in confusion, then glances at the driver - Jeremy, she remembers, that’s Jeremy, the other blonde is Bass, and he is Miles - who shakes his head sadly.

“Power went out, sweetheart,” he says, offering her a sad smile. “Lots of stuff has changed,” he grunts as he slaps the reins over the horses backs to make them break into a trot. “Though not as I much as I thought, apparently,” he mutters, and even in her utter exhaustion, Nora’s heart aches with the implication.

Good and bad existed just like they always had. Things had been turned upside down and shaken, and the natural order of things left to fall out. Nature didn’t give a damn about who was good or who was bad; it was ruled by the strong and spat out the weak.

She twists to look at the men walking behind the cart, their faces sombre in the morning light. She doesn’t know if they are good men, or if they can be trusted with all these children they’ve just rescued. Maybe they’re trading bad for worse. But she doesn’t think so, and one thing she does know. They’re not weak.

And she and Mia need to learn how to be strong.

  
*  


_May 10, 2013: Matheson-Monroe camp, near Bogalusa, Louisiana._

“How’s your sister doing?”

Bass plops down on the log next to her, Miles settling on the next one round, a little too far away for idle conversation. She wonders what they need her for, because Miles has made it clear he’s not interested in talking to her. In fact, she’s pretty sure he’s been avoiding her ever since they arrived two weeks ago, not an easy feat in a camp of 30 people.

She had tried not to feel hurt, because she has watched him enough to know exactly how busy he is. Even if most of the adults help out one way or another in running the camp, Bass and Miles are clearly its leaders, no matter how much they pretend democracy. Julia Neville rules the roost on administrative things, Bass’ girlfriend Shelly keeps the social wheels greased, but ultimately, where they go, what they do, how much they get to eat … it all comes back to the two men. 

Nora, meanwhile, spends most of her time riding herd on the gaggle of damaged kids rescued with her sister. She figures it’s because she is young and female and otherwise useless; when Julia had asked her what she was good at, Nora had shrugged and admitted she had little to no practical skills. “Except for stealing stuff and blowing shit up,” she’d added as an afterthought.

Apparently, that information had filtered back to them, and they have come to quiz her about it. Mia, she assures them, is settling in nicely, and while the kids they had rescued were mostly timid and kept to themselves, they were as well as could be expected.

The basic niceties disposed of, Miles changes gear abruptly. “What do you mean, you like blowing shit up? Like, EOD?”

She’d heard the rumor that they were Marines, and she had seen them fight, but the terminology confirms it like nothing else. It had been her father’s favorite topic, and his professional specialty. Nora hadn’t exactly got on with her Dad, kinda hated him for leaving Mama in the lurch, but she’d been his little girl once, and in that moment misses him fiercely. She swipes at her watery eyes before looking up too find Miles watching her.

He shifts uncomfortably, the flush on his cheeks she confirming something else she’s suspected since the day they met. He’s attracted to her, but he doesn’t want to be. It doesn’t take her long to find out why.

“I was working towards my PhD in chemical engineering when the lights went out,” she explains. “Plastiques and accelerants, mainly, but I’m good with anything that goes boom.”

Their obvious intrigue is marred by disbelief. Miles just frowns, but Bass tilts his head to examine her, and then he starts to cough, his face transformed by a sly glee.

“How old are you, Nora?”

Suddenly the penny drops.

She tries not to grin back, and refuses to look at Miles to see what he thinks. “Oh, the baby face. It lies. I’m nearly 21. I got done with school quicker than most, but yeah — all grown up.”

“Still a kid,” Miles huffs, but the next time he meets her eyes, he doesn’t look away.

Later, when Bass has long since meandered back to his girlfriend, Miles moves close enough to offer her a swig from his flask, then stays sprawled next to her, long body heating the spaces between them. Nora tells herself not to make too much of it, but her heart is refusing to listen, slamming a crescendo inside her ribcage and flushing every part of her with unwelcome heat. She’s so annoyed, she gulps down the cheap whiskey and is taken aback by the burn, coughing and spluttering so helplessly that Miles ends up rubbing her back to help her recover. Her humiliation is turning into something considerably more delicious when he opens his fool mouth. 

“Not so grown up after all, huh?” he drawls, lips quirking upwards in amusement.

Nora snorts in disgust and tells him in no uncertain terms that the ability to stomach alcohol has nothing to do with maturity. She’s quiet for a moment, staring into the fire, thinking about the way things used to be.

“In a way we were all kids before the lights went out, no matter how old we were. It’s like a really nasty wake up call - no more cushy life, time to grow up,” she says wistfully, then shoots him a glare that dares him to make his usual snarky comeback. His patronising bullshit is infuriating, but there’s a part of her that wants to snuggle up to all that heat, and explore that rangy body with her teeth, and ignore the fact Miles Matheson can be a dismissive asshole.

So of course he chooses that moment to be human.

“You’re not wrong there, Nora,” Matheson rasps, and it’d be a lot easier to deal with this uncomfortable lust if those black coffee eyes of his weren’t eyeing her with a strange mix of respect and regret. He looks weary as he rubs at the back of his neck, and she he has to focus on the rip on his sleeve, the creases that bracket his mouth, anything except the dizzying possibilities of those big, deadly hands. She grabs the bottle of whiskey gratefully when he offers it to her again, a peace offering.

“Figure we’ve all got a lot of growing up to do.” His voice is flat, but something tells her he’s thinking of the kids they’ve rescued, and maybe others that he hadn’t been able to help. She narrows her eyes at him, wary of what feels too much like sympathy.

She’s wrong.

“Could have sworn you were a goddamn teenager,” he’d admits eventually, and she can hear a note in his voice that tells her he hadn’t liked that fact one little bit. She kind of likes him even more for it, but that doesn’t mean he’s off the hook.

“And that was a problem why?” Nora asks, willing him to look at her. He does, eventually, dragging his eyes away from the campfire to meet the cool challenge in her own, then letting his gaze wander elsewhere, over the curves of her face, her bare shoulders, and finally, the lushness of her breasts. She’d been wearing a flannel shirt earlier in the day, but had discarded it once the fire had warmed her though, the thin tank underneath doing nothing to disguise the rise and fall of her chest once her pulse starts to gallop under the weight of his stare.

“Felt like a pervert,” he growls, but he has already shifted to bring their bodies into alignment, his bicep brushing her shoulder, his long thighs burning into her own.

“No need,” she breathes, and leans up to press her lips to his. She’s never tried to seduce a man before, and still isn’t sure if she’s got it in her, but the fact that she wants to is enough. And something about this man makes her want the most outrageous things, Nora discovers when his mouth opens in surprise underneath her own.

They sip at each other tentatively at first, then slant into something that makes her heart begin to hammer an over-excited tattoo. He recovers quickly from his initial surprise, licking around her mouth before his tongue flickers into hers as if to say hello. She welcomes him, and when they tangle together, stroking and sucking and teasing, things spin rapidly out of control. Miles drags her into his lap as his mouth ravages her own, breaking the kiss only to lick his way up and down her vein throbbing in the side of her neck, before returning to her mouth with a groan.

Kissing him is like drowning in a sea of whiskey, sweat and man, and she doesn’t even want to swim, Nora thinks incredulously. He rockets through her system like the pretty blue tab she took at that rave last summer, madness and joy and freedom, and she doesn’t do drugs, she doesn’t, but … she wriggles closer, wants more, wants everything, right up until the moment he groans into her mouth, hands sliding under her ass to stroke for one delirious second before he lifts her free of him.

He sets her back on the log next to him, and deprived of his heat, she shivers. He rubs both hands up and down her arms then leans their foreheads together. “Kinda out in the open here,” he explains after a moment.

Nora lifts her eyes to his and tries not to be embarrassed by her behavior. They’re both adults. They have a right. (If he hadn’t stopped them, she suspects she wouldn’t have. Would have let him touch her as much as he liked, right there by the fire. Oblivious to their surroundings.) 

Still might, she acknowledges, rubbing her thighs together and shuddering at the mini earthquakes that result.

“We could -”

They smile uncomfortably at their tangled conversation. “You go first,” Nora says, and she’s not being a coward, or doing the girly thing, she tells herself. It’s just that he has his own tent, and she doesn’t.

“Wanna get out of here?”

“What - you mean this swinging bar? We gonna get a cab back to yours and have coffee?”

He laughs at her sharp comeback, then shrugs. “Nah. Could go back to my tent and fuck, though.”

Once upon a time, she might have thrown her drink in a guy’s face after a line like that. But she’d been mad at him earlier that night for avoiding her, and you can’t say that isn’t a straightforward proposition, Nora tells herself. And maybe this is a bad idea, really fucking stupid in fact, because he’s a Marine and the world’s going to hell, and she needs to focus on looking after Mia and not on her love life.

But Mia is sleeping and Miles is there, and if there’s anything she’s learned tonight, it’s that if anyone that can make the world go away for a little while, it’s him.

So she stands up, stretches out her back, and smiles when his eyes cross a little.

“You gonna call me kid again?”

“Kind of a reflex. It’s that or ‘soldier’,” he confesses, but he pushes himself to his feet next to her and takes her hand. “That a problem?”

“Not if you call me soldier,” she smirks, then has to tell her libido to calm the fuck down when he lifts her hand to his mouth, then sinks his teeth into the fleshy mound below her thumb.

She gets her own back, later. She presses him down into his sleeping bag, and leaves bite marks everywhere she can find enough spare flesh to bite down. The ridge of muscle above his collarbone, his sinewy biceps. The surprisingly plump curve of his ass, and the long stretch of thigh. The tattoo she finds on the dizzying slope of muscle that directs her straight to his cock. Her mouth is already watering, hungry to taste him the way he’s already tasted her, but she still manages to sink her teeth into that neat little circle with his initial. M for Matheson, she assumes.

Odd place for it, she thinks, but then she’s distracted, musk sharp on her tongue and his thankful groans ratcheting her own arousal back up to fever pitch. Sex with him makes her stupid with lust, she discovers, her vocabulary stuttering into sharp curses and crude pleas, and even the drift of a sharp fingernail over sensitive skin capable of shutting down any sort of critical process she might have.

All that’s left is mindlessness, and the flare of white-hot passion. Flame and fuse, fuel and .. _Oh God_. Ignition.

Kaboom, her body screams, and it’s best, great, better than anything else ever was, for weeks on end, right up until she falls into the huge crater they’ve left in the ground.

  
*  


_July 23, 2013: Matheson-Monroe camp, Hattiesburg, Mississippi_  


“We’ve got to defend our supplies. There are too many thieving bastards out there, and we can’t just let them take our food,” Miles thunders, and - yeah. No one is about to argue with him, not with their carefully harvested supply of tinned foodstuffs suddenly gone.

But Miles is a soldier, and his idea of “defend” isn’t the same as other people. It involves tracking down the thieves, and putting a gun in their faces, and recovering the stolen food, and a good stockpile more.

“You should have only taken what they stole from us!” Shelley scolds Bass when they return from the recovery mission. “What are they going to eat?” she snaps, and none of them can look at Shelly - or Miles - after that.

Because he’d sent them ahead with Bass to drag the sled loaded with food, but that didn’t mean they hadn’t heard the sharp retort of his gun, a bullet for each of the four raiders.

They shouldn’t have stolen our food, Nora had told herself at the time. We have so many more mouths to feed. But that hadn’t wiped away the stain on her conscience, and as spring turned into summer, it spread into a huge, ulcerating wound. Because as it turns out, Nora and Miles are a really good team.

Her technical knowledge finds its match in his strategic nous, and together, they explore every possibility available to them. They start with booby traps, to protect their storehouse, then work their way through an entire arsenal of small bombs. She learns to improvise, to experiment with basic household supplies to ensure she has an escape route from every situation.

And he teaches her a whole new level of ruthless.

They’d been trapped in the old pharmacy during a standard supply run, so delighted by the stash of condoms they’d found that the urget to celebrate overtook them right in the middle of the storeroom floor. She’s riding him, filling the air with litany of profane prayers, when the click of a gun penetrates their lustful daze.

The fat-bellied old man doesn’t seem much of a threat at first, giggling at their predicament and even averting his eyes while Nora wriggles off Miles. It’s only as they stand with their hands up that Nora catches the slight jerk of Miles’ chin, indicating something in the room beyond. She listens, then, and catches the faint hum of voices through the closed door.

“Out you go, then,” the happy voyeur indicates, and they file ahead of him obediently. Nora catches her breath as they emerge into the front of the pharmacy, where a dozen people - men and women alike, of every age - are systematically emptying the already-plundered shelves.

“Found condoms,” the old man reports gleefully to the room at large. “Minus one these sinners were in the middle of using.”

“Shameless hussy!” a white-haired woman in a long dress clucks. “Children are a gift to the world.”

“So we’ll keep the condoms then,” Miles shrugs. “You folks can have everything else.”

Things go fairly smoothly until “everything else” is deemed to include Miles and Nora as some sort of indentured laborers. “Your penance,” the group’s matriarch smiles winningly. 

“Yeah? That’s not going to happen,” Miles says, his arm clamping around his so-called captor’s neck quicker than the eye can follow. “We’re walking out of here. Nora - get what we need and then go.”

The middle aged man levelling a gun in her direction shoots his mother a frantic look, then fires at the ceiling in seeming panic. It’s clear to Nora that they’re crazy as loons, but not really smart enough to be a real threat.

Miles snaps the old man’s neck anyway. “Go!” he yells, and nobody stops her as she sprints for the street, Miles scrambling behind her. Then he locks the door behind them.

“That window up there,” he explains as she frowns at him in confusion. “Little present for the fuckers.”

Maybe it was the adrenaline that had paralysed her moral centre. Maybe it was the shock of being held hostage. Or maybe, she wonders later, it was the flat certainty in his voice that this was the way things had to go.

Whatever excuses she manages to find, it’s her expertise that coolly mixes the ingredients, and her fingers that hold flame to fuse. Her eye that judges the distance to the window, and her arm that lobs it in.

Her conscience burdened with the deaths of eight people, only a handful of whom actually had guns.

She doesn’t sleep, after that. She turns her back to the canvas wall, mumbles something about a headache when he tries to touch her, and spends the night marinating in her own guilt. 

Nora starts packing in the morning, and tells the guy in charge of the horses that she and Mia are scouting some new defenses on the ridge above the camp. “Don’t go up there unarmed,” he hollers after her, and she salutes him with a wave of Miles’ favorite handgun.

(She’s already a cold-blooded murderer, she’d told herself. No point in agonising over being a thief.)

The next time she sees Miles Matheson, she is trying to kill him.

  
*  


_Nora moans, bloody hands clutching at Miles shirt, refusing to descend into the monster-filled delirium. She hadn’t been wrong to leave - if anything, the rise of General Matheson had shown her how right she was - but it still hurts. She’d sell her soul for five more minutes with him, and she’d squandered four years. But …_

_Had she? Would she have been the same person if she’d stayed? Where might her path have led then? She smiles at the sudden weight of a child in her arms, warm and breathing and alive, and the thought of a man who might hoard his smiles for her, and spill his feelings from a willing tongue. “Miles,” she breathes, and it gives her the strength to force her eyelids open a little, drink in that grief-worn face. But … that’s not right._

_She’s never had a child, not one that lived, and Miles has never been truly hers. These were her tragedies, but they were hers, her life, bought and paid for in blood and sacrifice._


	4. June 2017

_June 28, 2017: Atlanta, Georgia._

  


Nora slides her eyes away from the warrant and shapes her mouth into its typical straight line, adding a little shrug. He’s hardly the usual bounty, so she lets a touch of wariness creep in, just enough to show she’s smart, but not scared. She has a reputation to uphold, and in some quarters, it’s every bit as formidable as his.

“You want me to bring in General Miles Matheson?”

“Well, it does say dead or alive. And frankly, we’d prefer dead,” Kelly Foster admits, one elegant hand tugging at her pearls. “Matheson, at least. Monroe we want to put on trial.”

Their crimes are listed on the flier below the artist’s rendering of their faces - Miles looks like the grim reaper, Nora notes, and they haven’t quite managed to catch Bass’ girlish prettiness. The likeness probably doesn’t matter, she allows, with the two most notorious men on the continent. Anyone able to get close enough will already know what they look like.

(Espresso black eyes and the harsh lines of his face softening as he stares down at her, breathing hard in the face of temptation. Licking at the corner of that tight, sarcastic mouth, asking to be let in. Finding it softer and more welcoming than she ever could have expected, feeling the strain in his muscles as he lets her lead the kiss for a long, dizzying moment before something snaps. Him surrounding her, all long limbs and sharp angles, devouring her.)

Her throat seizes for a moment and Nora has to grope desperately for her trademark cool. Slow breaths. She’d done the right thing. Refused to be complicit in the things he’d wanted to do, long before he’d shown the world what he was capable of. She forces herself to remember the devastation she’s seen in the towns to the north when his militia has blasted its way through. The stories she’s heard. She stares down at the hook nose and shadowed eyes that decorate the warrant and sets her face into its usual impassive lines.

“It will be expensive. Could take a while, and I’ll need someone to look after my sister.”

“Mia, isn’t it? She’s very welcome to stay here while you’re up north. She and my Tahlia are about the same age,” Foster smiles, and as hostage negotiations go, it’s the one of the more civilised Nora has been involved in. So be it. Mia will be fed, safe and maybe even schooled while she’s away, and Nora will do the job, and never once have to face the pesky, uncomfortable reality of having a choice. 

“Thank you. That’s very kind. Mia will be excited to meet you again, Madam President.” The hero worship was a tad over the top, in fact, but there was no doubt her sister would be happy to live under the same roof as her idol.

They don’t talk expenses or anything as crude as payment; Nora knows to visit the accountant on her way out of the building. “I’ll aim to leave by Monday,” she attempts to close the negotiation, but Foster isn’t willing to dismiss her just yet. She needs to salve her conscience, Nora realises as the leader of the newly declared Georgia Federation stares out over her rose gardens.

“I hate that this is our only option, but we have a responsibility to those poor souls being steamrolled into that so-called Republic.”

Not steamrolled, Nora knows.

Mathesoned. And from what she’s heard, Monroed too, but her head is having more trouble with that one. They were calling Miles the Butcher of Baltimore, making him out to be some terrifying carrion crow of a man, and if she’s honest (and fuck, doesn’t _that_ hurt), it’s easier to believe than the idea of happy-go-lucky Bass as enemy number one. President Monroe. First citizen of the dread regime that had grown out of the huddle of desperate adults and homeless children she and Mia had ridden away from four years before.

It’s not their capability she doubts - she’d seen Bass and Miles in action first hand, still dreamed about it sometimes. For cold, hard death dealing, nothing compared to the Matheson-Monroe machine, but there it was. Matheson-Monroe. Miles in the lead, Bass backing him up, cooling him down, talking sense when Miles was overcome with that single-minded fury. Maybe, she considers, that’s why they chose Bass to be president, and Miles as his enforcer. But if their great plan was to moderate their darker impulses, well, it didn’t seem to be working.

Or maybe that was just Kelly Foster’s propaganda, Nora’s once-romantic soul insists on pointing out. She’s heard things about what’s going on down south too, dreadful things about vast numbers of people corralled up to work the plantations once more, and pogroms to thin out dissent. Kelly Foster liked to sweep her dirtier secrets under the carpet, but Miles and Bass simply wouldn’t bother. Perhaps they were simply more honest monsters.

The shudder of lust takes her by surprise, even if it shouldn’t. She still dreams of him, sometimes. He’d come leaping over the corpses he had left behind, and gather her up to check she wasn’t hurt, those big hands running all over her in his need to touch her. He’d kiss her first, this time, and they wouldn’t waste time on small talk, and instead of a musty sleeping bag on a rickety camp bed, they’d end up in a room with a huge bed and clean sheets and all the time they needed to get to know each other all over again.

Nora clutches at the posters rolled together in her fist, and wonders if it’s a hanging offense to fantasise about the supreme bogeyman of an enemy state. She’s been working for various incarnations of the Georgian government for more than a year now, and never once mentioned she’d spent time up north. The fact that she was from Texas was deemed dodgy enough, but she made herself useful tracking down the people Foster wanted to lock up, and kept her head down. Competence and discretion were the key - she might have stumbled into this game, but she’d made damn sure to get very good, very fast.

(Her secret? She thinks likes Miles, and plans like Nora.)

It’s not like she chose to become a bounty hunter - she seems to have done nothing except search for people since that very first night the lights went out. Sometimes she feels as if she’s tiptoeing through that darkened house still, desperate for a noise or some sign of Mama and Mia, but now her house is the crumbling remains of her country, and all the half-assed regimes rising up in it’s wake.

She and Mia had hightailed it south from Matheson camp, sticking to the side roads and travelling at night, even though she didn’t know if Miles cared enough to come after them. She hadn’t even told Mia why they were leaving, just that they needed to go. Later, once she could speak over the pain in her chest, she tells her sister they’re going to find the last remaining bit of family they might have, a pair of great aunts they’d last visited in Atlanta.

It takes her nearly two months to track down the old ladies, the only lead she had being an unusual name and a page torn from the old Atlanta phone book. A chatty neighbour tells her the younger one hadn’t lasted long after the lights went out - something about dialysis - but the other one, eighty if she was a day, had led them on a merry dance all over northern Georgia. They finally find her in a little village outside of Athens, and she smiles and clucks but has absolutely no idea who they are. The Alzheimers has taken her completely, and family or no, she and Mia are as alone as they’ve ever been.

Nora had been sitting in the local bar, trying to figure out her next move, when a man a few stools down started listening in to the very-much-abridged story she was telling the barkeep. On his way out the door, he’d introduced himself as the local sheriff, and told her to swing by the jailhouse in the morning.

“Seems to me you’re good at finding people. This new government in Atlanta want lots of folks found,” he’d said, unrolling a batch of wanted posters. “They pay top dollar - food, or gold, whatever. I even heard stories some people are even paying in diamonds these days.”

It’s the easiest living a girl like her is going to be allowed to make, she figures, so she sets herself to learning everything there is to know about finding people, and tricking them into coming quietly. She makes Athens her base and funnels a few diamonds each week to the family that Great Aunt Laura has been boarding with, and she and Mia visit as often as they can. She feels part spy, part jailer and all therapist, some days, but that’s okay. That’s good, as long as someone’s not urging her to take the ‘dead’ part of Wanted Dead or Alive too seriously.

Then she gets invited down to Capitol House in Atlanta, and that small protection is stripped away by the one employer she can’t say no to.

She’s killed before. Not often, never by choice, but she remembers the dread that makes her limbs seize and the little voice inside her head screaming objections. And underneath it all, the thrill she gets from planning the blast, her brain practically crowing as it supplies all the possibilities, her ego swelling as she admires just how good she is at this. Then there’s her pyromaniac glee, the wicked anticipation of the flame licking at the fuse, and then, kaboom. Oh, how she loves that part.

It’s the pleasure she gets that makes her sick, so she buries it deep, and enlists every other skill in her increasingly well equipped arsenal. Sometimes, she doesn’t even keep explosives in her backpack anymore. Not even a few twists of loose gunpowder for emergencies - it’s too easy to use. Too tempting.

No, she goes after a mark with information, and cunning, and if she needs to, the womanly wiles that her mama taught her. _“Now flick your hair, mija, and look up through your lashes. Men like that.”_ She’d never used them in real life, too straightforward to flirt, but this was work, just like pageants used to be.

But she’s certainly not going to be able to flirt her way into Miles Matheson’s circle. He knows her, and probably isn’t too well disposed towards her, not that Foster can know that.

(Alarm prickles up her spine at the possibility that Foster might know that she can get close to Miles, and could even know why. But if the woman knows that, she has to know the siren act wouldn’t work on Miles anyway. He was just too good.)

No, this would need to be a straightforward blast job. An ambush, taking Miles out of the equation and giving her the chance to scoop up Monroe in the confusion. Bloody, and final.

She wouldn’t have to look at him, let alone risk her future - and Mia’s - on the outside chance that a few kisses might erode her resolve.

  
*   


_July 19, 2017: Philadelphia, The Monroe Republic._

Philadelphia bustles with the energy of the young and newly important, never mind that it’s one of the oldest cities on the continent. The city of brotherly love has been reinvented as the capital of the Monroe Republic, and there’s something about the dynamism of the place that takes her breath away. This isn’t Atlanta, where Southern manners demand everyone at least pretend to get along; Philadelphia is Matheson and Monroe - exciting, rackety, and not even pretending to be safe. Nora keeps her face turned down, her shoulders slumped and her movements small, just another refugee shuffling through Monroe’s city on the way to its soup kitchens.

Shelly’s influence, Nora expects, thought she hadn’t been able to dig out any information on who else ruled with Monroe and Matheson. A few she recognises - the Nevilles were still hanging around, apparently, and Baker too - but all the other names she managed to turn up were unfamiliar. And the government is less an administration and more a military machine. Everywhere she looks, the jackbooted militia are shoving people aside on the sidewalks, yelling for passage in the roads, leaving no one in any doubt who runs the place.

And then there are the posters. Nora shivers as she looks at the wall she’s come to rest against, Monroe’s face staring out at her with a supercilious half smile, exhorting his citizens pay their taxes and support reconstruction. This time, he’s every bit as beautiful as she remembers, but surely it’s an imperfectly rendered drawing that makes him look so remote, and cold. He was hugger, she remembers, with one of those laughs that you couldn’t help but laugh along with, warm sunshine to Miles Matheson’s more laconic presence.

He doesn’t look like that man anymore.

Not that it matters, Nora reminds herself sharply. She’s here to do a job. Scope out their movements, learn their routines. Determine the most effective time and place possible.

Then … boom.

And the inevitable excitement rising in her belly makes her want to scream, to tell her traitor mind that this is Miles, who taught her how to do half this shit. The bombs, that’s all her, but the sneaking around, scouting for locations, finding the perfect place to leave the charges and the perfect time to set them off … that was dozens of hours spent scouting raider camps together, and desultory midnight conversations. Miles whispering dirty, loaded words into her skin as he worked her over, nipples - mmm, charges, cause when I suck on these babies, love the way it charges you up, soldier, but here, - his hand, walking its way down her belly, sliding between her legs to tweak and pull at her clit - now there’s the fuse.

Her mouth is dry, remembering, and he’s throbbing in her blood as much as the bombs ever did, and she’s setting the charges to kill him, her incredulous mind screams.

And then its not just her mind screaming, it’s the people around her.

It’s her, she realises with a shock.

She’s the one screaming, and falling, victim of her own carnage, buried in the wreckage of her own life.

_(Did she hesitate? Was she betrayed? She had spent so many years trying to forget those moments, that even when she tries to remember all she manages is that red mist of pain and regret. Something about the charges, and her fingers shaking. Had she been able to do it, or had she changed her mind before it all went wrong? She’d like to think she had, but then she remembers that girl, sharp as a blade and pragmatic to a fault.)_

The pain comes roaring in before anything else, stabbing through her head the moment she climbs back to consciousness. Nora abandons the attempt to open her eyes and lies completely still in the hope of making it stop. Maybe that will help her remember too. She’s got as far as placing the charges but after that … nothing but red mist.

She wriggles her toes, eyes still clamped shut, and bends her knees a little. It’s only when she tries to put a despairing hand up to explore the lacerations on her face that she realises she can’t, and her eyes shoot open to find her hands shackled to the rails of the narrow hospital bed.

“Don’t bother.”

The voice is bleak and mocking, completely absent of sympathy or anything identifiable as feeling. It sluices through her like a bucket of icy water, leaving her numb and threatening to stop her heart. It can’t be him, Nora tells herself, and forces her eyes into focus just to be sure.

A dark blur resolves itself into Miles Matheson, leaning against the wall, watching her. The uniform that looks so impeccably cut on other soldiers hangs awkwardly on him, slightly too short for his long arms and baggy over his bony shoulders. His face is more drawn than she remembers and his glossy, slicked back hair makes him look like the chief bloodsucker in a 70s vampire movie. It’s the vicious line of his mouth that scares her, though.

It’s the mouth of a man who had been generous once, and since seen the error of his ways.

“Nice little set up, back there.”

Nora would roll her eyes - flattery, Miles? Really? - except her head hurts, and the glitter in his eyes tells her it wouldn’t be wise. Don’t poke the angry bear, Nora, she tells herself, and tries to think of something non-confrontational to say. But really, what is there? I was falling in love with you and it was too scary for me to handle so I ran off and became someone else, and surprise, now I’m back to spit in the face of your hospitality?

She defaults to ignoring him, closing her eyes again, effectively playing dead.

“We’re turning the city upside down right now, looking for your co-conspirators. Wonder how many people my militia are gonna rough up before we decide you’re just a girl with a grudge?”

Nora’s eyes pop open and she pushes herself upright to rail at him before she realises what she’s done. But it’s not her professional pride that’s at stake here, and there’s nothing to be gained in getting herself tortured for information that isn’t a secret. 

“I’m a bounty hunter. I have two warrants with your faces on them. I work alone, but you already know all of that,” she says quietly.

“Except when you take Mia with you. She must be all of 16 or 17 now,” he drawls, moving closer to the bed. “Have you been showing baby sister the ropes, Nora? A bit of bombmaking here, a bit of seduction there? Is she out there right now softening up my guards?”

“They can’t be very good if all it takes to soften them up is a teenage girl,” Nora fires back, unthinking. 

Miles snorts. “Never underestimate the power of a man’s cock to make him ignore the obvious. But you’ll be glad to know I put it in the fucking manual. No playing the hero for pretty girls, because they might turn out to be _epically_ ungrateful.”

Nora clenches her fists in the bedsheets in a bid not to react, but his smug satisfaction tells her he knows the jibe landed effectively. He looms at the end of the bed and smirks down at her, waiting.

“It’s not personal,” she offers after long minutes of silence. “I wasn’t in a position to turn the job down.”

“30 pieces of silver now, 30 later?”

“Funny. I would have thought it was Monroe who had the Messiah complex, not you.”

General Matheson’s eyes cloud to inky black, and he stalks around the bed to hiss directly into her face.

“President Monroe hasn’t heard about this yet. I’m still trying to figure out how to tell him that a girl we helped out, a girl we fed and clothed and protected, someone we thought was one of us right up until the minute she ran off, is the bitch who tried to kill us. But how do you tell someone that? Especially someone …” 

Nora blinks at the sudden throb of emotion in his voice. It can’t be real, she panics. He’s simply flicked a switch, pretending to be the man she used to know. This is General Matheson, who piles the bodies of his dead around the towns he’s just conquered to warn the neighbors he’s coming for them next. Not sad, worried Miles who took the welfare of entire camp on his back.

But venom has faded from his voice until it sounds almost weary. “I’m having a hard enough time believing it myself, and I was the one who pulled you out of there as the whole place went up. Told myself it had to be an accident, until we’d found the charges you’d left along the route. ”

It’s his attempt to believe in her that does it. Nora turns her head away to hide the tears welling in her eyes. None of her plans, not a single one, accounted for being taken alive, and overcome with guilt. It’s her number one rule: never feel guilty for the compromises she makes in the name of survival. She can deal with his anger, even his hate, because she did what she damn well had to.

“Bounty hunter’s one thing, but when did they turn you into an assassin, Nora?”

Nora blinks at him in astonishment, then bites down hard on her tongue to keep from screaming “you did!” Is she that forgettable? Are the things they did together so lost in the atrocities that have come since that he doesn’t remember that first day she killed in cold blood?

Maybe both remembering someone else, she panics. He’s thinking of a girl long gone, and she’s grateful to a man who may as well be dead. But it’s been so long, so long since anyone thought of her at all, that she’s hanging by her fingernails, scrabbling at the edge of the cliff.

And it’s crumbling around her, that first scatter of loose stones giving way to bigger things, a landslide of memories and feelings and huge boulders of guilt that batter her until she doesn’t want to hold on anymore. So she lets go.

“They’ve got Mia,” she whispers to the wall, and she’s not asking for help, just understanding.

He cups her chin and turns her face back to him, interrogating her with his narrow-eyed gaze. She’s not sure what he finds in her eyes - even the truth is ugly and awful - but something shifts, his fingers tracing the slope of her cheekbone for the tiniest of moments before he turns on his heel and strides out of the room.

Nora is too shaken to wonder what he plans to do. He still touches her like Miles Matheson, she shudders, and tries to summon at least the semblance of fear. Not this churning, too familiar feeling that she’s never quite managed to forget.

  
*  


The fear arrives when she meets President Monroe.

“Let me get this straight. She tried to kill us and in return, you want to rescue her sister. Again.”

His voice is light, almost laughing, but Nora’s gut screams danger. She remembers a scruffy, affable drifter, not this man who had prowled into the room and sent a chill down her spine with one contemptuous blast of his too-blue eyes. Spite drips from between distractingly perfect lips, and the soft rasp of his voice reminds her of nothing more than a silken garrote.

“Really, Miles? Is her pussy _that_ sweet?”

And then there’s that. Bass had smiled before, cuddled the kids and offered everyone a friendly hand, but he’d only seen Shelley. No one in the camp had even tried to flirt with him, he’d been so transparently devoted, but now, his eyes slide up and down her body with undisguised heat. That scares her more than anything else does.

Matheson snorts at the suggestion, but doesn’t even try to set the President straight, launching into his rationale for going after Mia instead.

“Nora can get us into Atlanta, Bass. Right into Kelly Foster’s house. We snatch Mia and they know that. Maybe we leave a note that if we have to come again, next time it’ll be one of her kids, or Foster herself. Buy us some good behavior.”

“Or, we just kill the bitch,” Monroe says coolly, one eyebrow raised as if to ask why Matheson would ever suggest otherwise. “Hang Nora here up in the courtyard to show people what happens to people who attack us, and leave her sister to rot.”

“C’mon Bass. You’re supposed to be the fucking politician here. Take out Foster, the Federation falls apart, and Texas comes stomping in. We’re not ready to take on Texas yet, but if we have Foster where we want her …”

Monroe’s mouth tightens as if he’s sucking on particularly unpalatable lemon. He almost pouts.

“She put warrants out for us, Miles. Like we were common criminals! Who does that?”

Nora wants to point out just how many people they are accused of killing, but figures it wouldn’t be judicious. Not when they’ve come begging for a favor. And not when her handiwork has its own body count.

“I was instructed to bring you in alive, if possible, Mr President. President Foster wants to … “

Put you on trial, she nearly says, then reconsiders it. “Discuss terms with you personally.”

Monroe snorts and she realizes he’s more canny than she had given him credit for. He’d had the same training as Miles, she reminds herself, and if he seemed more open and honest, maybe that was just his pretty face. There’s something else there, though, a taint she’s not quite managing to identify, something in the too-bright glitter of his eyes, or the lazy twist of that distracting mouth.

“Oh, Nora. Ducking and diving like a pro these days, aren’t we. And to think we thought you were a slippery little fish back then.” He drags a finger over his lips as he sprawls behind his desk, eyes darting between them, then throws his hands in the air.

“Go, then. Stick a snake in the bitch’s bed or something. Make sure it’s worth our while. And Nora.”

She meets his gaze, brows lifted in enquiry.

“Once you and Miles are finished your Bonnie and Clyde routine, we own you. You bring Mia back here, we find you a house, and then we put you to work. You catch who I tell you to catch, and kill who I tell you to kill. Are we clear?”

Frying pan, meet fire, she thinks before she bends her head in obedience.

“Yes, Mr President.”


	5. August 2017

 

_August 14, 2017: Philadelphia, The Monroe Republic_

President Monroe handpicks a small detachment of soldiers to accompany them to Atlanta, and General Matheson tells him to fuck off. Matheson buys an itinerant pedlar’s entire stock and his wagon, and Monroe has it all burned. Three days into their plan to steal back Mia, Nora starts to wonder how the _hell_ these two ever managed to agree long enough to survive the Blackout, let alone create their own country.

It’s when she catches them together laughing about it that she loses it.

“I’m leaving tomorrow. I don’t care how many soldiers come, or what they’re going to do when we hit Georgia, but I’m going in to get my sister out. Whatever else you want to do is up to you morons,” she hisses, and walks out.

She’s throwing her underwear and a spare t-shirt into a bag she’d scrounged from the militia store when an impatient pounding on the door tells her Miles has tracked her down. She considers ignoring it, but she is his guest. And employee. And possibly prisoner too, though she tries not to think about that one too much. This gig is going to be hard enough as it is.

Nora carefully folds her maps and looks about for anything else she has to pack before reluctantly crossing to the door.

“What?”

General Matheson scowls back at her and then looks away, his straight back and stony face fading for a moment as he pinches at the bridge of his nose. “I talked him down. We’ll take a couple of outriders with us, but just the two of us will head in to get her out,” he says after a moment.

His eyes flick back to her face, uncharacteristically skittish, before locking on her own. “We’re not taking this lightly, Nora. We’ll get Mia out safe. It’s just … what we do to get through,” he says quietly, and maybe she’s delusional, or maybe he’s actually trying to apologize.

She wants to say thank you, wants to tell him that she understands that need not to take the awful realities of their lives too seriously, but in that moment, he looks so much like the Miles she used to know that the want rises up to crush her, and all she can manage is a strangled nod.

“0600 then?”

“Sun up,” she confirms, because the Generals might have a working clock stashed somewhere but she sure as hell doesn’t.

  
*

He still slouches on his horse, Nora thinks as they wind their way down the ridge in single file, the first streaks of sunset lighting the sky. Even at his most General-like, Matheson doesn’t wrap himself in the trappings of office the way Monroe does, all ramrod straight backbone and perfectly shined boots. All The Butcher needs to inspire dread is his trademark pair of swords and that unflinching black-eyed gaze; in Philadelphia, he plays the role of Monroe’s ruthless enforcer to the hilt. Out here, he is more relaxed, and she can see Miles in him again.

Nora wants to smile when he takes sarcastic potshots at Havers and Black, the two soldiers unlucky enough to be riding with them, and has to smother a laugh when his eyes find hers to share the depths of his frustration. Then they enter the single street town at the bottom of the hill, the first town they’ve encountered since crossing the current border between the Republic and the Federation, and young Private Black throws an unthinking salute as they swing off their horses in front of the bar. She has to grab his arm to keep him from decking the boy.

“Be nice,” she mutters, then slides her arm through his as if they’re out for an evening stroll. Miles bares his teeth at her and then decides to take his revenge by swinging her around and up against a wall to nuzzle at her neck.

“I can be very, very nice. Remember?” he breathes into her neck, and every one of her senses starts to shriek.

Nora ignores the alarm bells, and the way her body has already started to respond to him, in favor of a fake giggle and moan. “Let’s find a room for the night, honey,” she says loudly, and drags him across the street in the direction of what she prays is a boarding house. (She’s pushing him out of her room the minute no one is watching, she vows. The _minute_.)

His performance continues as she spins pretty lies for their disapproving host, and all the way up the stairs once they’ve secured two rooms. He pins her against the door before she can get the key in, the bastard, kissing her long and wet as an elderly couple shuffle past up the hall behind them. “We’ll have to take the mattress off the bed so we don’t make too much noise,” he mock whispers as the white-haired pair let themselves into the next room. Nora waits until the door closes behind them to jam her boot heel down on his foot.

“Try keeping quiet through that,” she hisses as she flees inside, shutting the door in his face.

Her fury isn’t enough to stop her thinking about him when she’s flat on her back in the wide bed. It doesn’t stop her wondering why she’s feeling like this, so angry and confused and conflicted. She’d left four years ago because he was turning into a monster, and the only thing she’d been wrong about was just how successful a monster he would become. Cities razed, entire towns wiped out, their nasty little dictatorship soaking up more territory every day. Yet …

It’s just gratitude, Nora tells herself. She’d gone there to kill him, and emerged alive, more than most of General Matheson’s opponents can brag. Emerged with him at her back, she admits, seemingly keen to play the protector once more. Understandable there should be some residual feelings, she tries to argue.

Which is bullshit, because the sexual charge between them had been all but extinguished by his cruelty, before. She’d been able to walk away, outraged and morally superior. Now, her hands are bloody too, and her limbs are restless with need to run to him, to crawl, to beg.

Nora pushes her face into the lumpy, smelly pillow and uses it to muffle her screams. Of frustration, of emotional overload, and finally, as she gives up the fight, of much-needed sexual release. (He’s not rescuing her, when she erupts into release. Not playing the gallant the way he used to in more girlish dreams. He’s wooing her with sword and knife, fucking her in a sea of blood, anointing her with ropes of cum atop their rotting legions of dead.)

She cries afterward, sick to her stomach. And then she makes herself come again, and again, desperate to find something more erotic than wreaking havoc with Miles Matheson.

Nora wakes sticky and tear-stained to a banging on the door. She freezes for a moment, memory eluding her, then slowly registers the bed, the dresser, the window that would overlook the street if it hadn’t been boarded up.

She’s in Georgia. The job is - Mia. Getting Mia back. With Miles.

General Matheson, she corrects herself, and pushes herself out of bed to confront him. He can make one of the boys in the other room sleep on the floor. There’s no way she’ll let him set foot in here.

“Dinner?”

He’s bathed, shaved, and smells of some woodsy soap that makes her want to bury her face in his neck.

“Uh -”

She watches him take a long breath and realises she still smells of the road, sweat and dust and three days without water for anything other than drinking. And the room is redolent with the unmistakable musk of recent sex.

He looks poleaxed.

“I’ll meet you across the road in half an hour,” she says calmly, then amazes herself by raising her eyes to his without even the faintest hint of a blush. “I need a bath.”

He nods curtly and turns away, but not before she notices the red that fires along his cheekbones, or the white of his knuckles as he grips the door. Arousal, she notes dispassionately. She’s not alone in this.

Good, Nora thinks uncharitably. Maybe he’ll keep his hands to himself from now on, now that they’ve acknowledged the stakes. Their stubborn bodies are clinging to an attraction that can’t be allowed to exist, and if she has to get off to be able to handle it, so be it.

There’s no place for him in this room, or that bed, or her life, as strange and tangled as their fates might be.

  
*

It’s easier, after that. He keeps his hands off, doesn’t try to needle her, and they slip back into their old partnership with disturbing ease. His strategic genius, her attention to detail, and good, fast horses get them to Atlanta within the week. They take a set of rooms in Decatur, only a few blocks from the little house that she used to share with Mia. She’d organised a sublet before she had left, but the little storage shed in the back is still filled with their own stash of books and supplies and weapons. Black and Havers spend the larger part of two entire nights retrieving the boxes, while Nora and Miles refine their plan.

“They’ll know my face, so I can’t be seen, and at least a few of them will be able to recognize you. That means those two will need to stake the place out, and we only move in when the way is clear,” Nora reasons.

General Matheson, however, doesn’t see the need for deceit.

“Nope. We want them to know we’re here. That you work for us now and Mia’s coming with. And that if Foster and her cronies mess with you again, I’ll burn the place down around their ears.”

Nora looks at him askance, resisting the urge to remind him that would effectively start a war. She’s not sure that isn’t entirely what he wants, and besides - she needs to ask the question that’s been burning a hole in her tongue ever since he’d unveiled his plan.

“Who’s gonna believe that the Republic would risk that for one bounty hunter?” she asks, trying to keep her tone even. No point letting him know she’s aching to know the truth of it.

Miles - because that little smirk, that teasing light in his eyes, that’s Miles - tilts his head in challenge, daring her to look awayn . “Wouldn’t do it for just any bounty hunter. But one as good as you? I might.”

The rest stays unsaid, but she’s not blind. She knows he respects her skills, has seen the admiration in his eyes when she pinches the gunpowder tight in its tube, or finesses a piece of information from someone. They’re a good team, sure. But she’s caught his eyes on her ass one too many times, and felt him hard against her belly when he played the ardent lover. The heat between them is rising, and it’s dangerous.

Too dangerous, unless she makes it very clear she’s not up for anything more than this. The job. Keep it strictly business, him in his uniform and her clutching her warrants, just another disposable asset of the Monroe Republic. Not Miles and Nora.

“The General’s best bounty hunter, huh?”

“Gotta prove yourself yet, soldier. The General’s favorite bounty hunter, sure.”

Nora winces and decides it’s time to stop beating around the bush. “So what’d I do to become that, General? Or is the question, what do I have to do?”

Her meaning clangs into the space between them, and the half smile on his face fades to a glacial stare.

“You think I’d force you into doing something you didn’t want to do? That’s the man you think I am now?”

She dips her head to take a long, cleansing breath and order her thoughts. “Not force me, no. And I don’t know who you are now - only the things they say about you,” she points out. “I thought you should know, is all. That’s not where this is going,” she says baldly. “I’m not part of this deal.”

The mask drops down over his features and Nora braces herself.

“You think I’d invade another country for pussy? C’mon, Nora, you’re a helluva lay but no one’s that good in the sack,” he sneers. “I’ll admit, I was angling for another round or two, but if you’re not into it, fine. Lots of other girls ahead of you in the line.”

Planning goes out the window after that, Miles - General Matheson, she reminds herself, _General Matheson_ \- stomping off into Atlanta’s late afternoon swelter, and Nora calming herself by checking and rechecking her stock of fuses. It’s solid, she tells herself as her hands twist and plait. The plan is solid, they’ll get in easy and waltz straight out.

She’s not scared, not of this.

(It’s him that makes her feel like she’s fifty feet up, clinging to a dilapidated swing bridge over a fucking ravine. Him, and the darkness she can see in him, and how it stirs something in her. Him, and how easy it would be, how tempting, to just let go. To fall.)

  
*

They slip through the halls of Foster’s house - ghosts, Mama whispers, ghosts - and find Mia snuffling away in her sleep in the third bedroom they check. Nora drinks in the sight of her sister before giving way to a pang of annoyance at the silken pajamas Mia is wearing, and the long tumble of unbound hair falling around her face. Three months in the President’s house and her little sister has forgotten all about rule number one.

Always sleep in your clothes. Always tie up your hair. Always be ready to run.

Nora crosses to the bureau and plucks out the plainest, most sturdy looking clothing she can find - she doesn’t recognize any of it, she notes, and wonders, not for the first time, how cooperative Mia is going to be in leaving Atlanta. She’d been content enough in the Matheson camp, before, and Nora had endured weeks of being treated like the worst person in the world for daring to drag her away from her friends, but life there had been nothing like this. Here, Mia is living in the sort of luxury that they’d never known, even before the Blackout.

She stuffs underwear, t-shirts and pairs of jeans into the bag, then sits on the bed to stroke Mia’s cheek until she wakes. Her eyes flutter open gently, her smile sleepy and accepting until she suddenly sits upright.

“Nora!” Mia hisses, then quickly looks around and drops her voice to a whisper. “How’d it go?”

“Not to plan,” is all Mia needs to know right now, Nora decides. “I’ve packed your bag. We’re leaving - quickly and quietly.”

Mia blinks up at her in confusion, but she’s sixteen and raised on the road. She shrugs and scrubs her hair back from the face, securing it in a hasty braid. Nora hands her a bra and pair of panties, and snorts when her sister tries to pack the pretty silk pajamas. Mia’s glare makes her back off, especially when a quick stab of insight suggests that she’s probably a little bit jealous. It’s been years since she slept in anything other than her clothes or her skin, and silk and lace - she just wishes she’d appreciated them more back when she’d had the chance, Nora tells herself.

She looks up to find Miles appearing as a dark shadow on the other side of the doorway. “Everything okay?”

“Yup. Are we ready to move?”

“Yep. Had a nice chat with the President. She wishes us the joy of your services. Almost sincerely, too,” he grins toothily.

“Apparently there was something about a loan, but I agreed not to singlehandedly destroy Georgia’s economy and she offered to sell your debt to us.”

“How nice,” Nora says faintly, then ushers Mia ahead of them as they escape the house through a side door and dissolve into the warm embrace of the Georgia night.

According to Miles, they argue clear to the border, and then sulk all the way to Philadelphia. Maybe he’s right, Nora has to admit. She’d given up on trying to reason with her sister after Mia had accused her of ruining her entire future just so she could get laid.

“I _beg_ your pardon?”

“I’m not stupid, Nora. I lived in that camp too, you know, and everyone was talking about just how _grateful_ you were to Miles and Bass for helping get me back. Wonder how you’ve paid for his help this time,” Mia sneers, and Nora’s palm itches with the need to slap the scorn off her little sister’s face.

It doesn’t help that her first instinct is to protest that she and Miles are far more than a simple transaction, and that the words are still thick in her mouth when she realizes that there’s nothing to defend. No such thing as ‘she and Miles.’ Nothing except her life, bought and paid for, just like Mia says, even if her body isn’t part of the deal.

They give her two weeks to settle in before summoning her to Independence Hall.

She blinks at the pile of outstanding warrants and turns down a glass of whiskey as she sorts through them, noting some of the most notorious names on the East Coast. Some of them, she notes dryly, are already sitting in Georgia’s cells, and at least one of them dines regularly at Foster’s table.

“Well, that answers that then,” Bass grins sunnily, as chuffed as if she’s aced a spelling test. “Two birds with one stone when we roll into Atlanta.”

Miles scrubs his hand over his face, muttering “we’re not invading fucking Atlanta,” to the uncaring ceiling. He recovers to nod towards the warrants and explain that none are high priority; they are to fill her time in between more urgent missions.

Message received, she thinks bitterly. She’s at their beck and call for any damn job they choose to throw her way, and she’s probably supposed to try and feel thankful to boot.

“Will that be all, Generals?”

Matheson makes a surprised face and levers himself to his feet while Monroe steps out from behind the big, brown desk to shake her hand. He doesn’t let go, though, trapping her hands between his own and staring down into her face. “I’m the President, he’s the General. We tossed a coin and everything,” he says lightly, then steps in closer breathe what feels horribly like a threat into her ear. “Try not to forget who’s in charge, Nora.”

Miles glowers at him before grabbing her arm to frogmarch her toward the door.

“Sorry about that,” he says abruptly once there’s no possibility of anyone being in earshot. His voice is flat, and embarrassed, and there’s a weird throb of pain in it. “You’re going to have to be … careful of Bass.”

Nora stares at him as if he’s just suggested his favorite pet might bite. President Monroe might get all the ills of the world laid at his feet, but Miles Matheson had always been his single greatest supporter. As far as Miles was concerned, Bass could do no wrong - or at least, didn’t used to be able to.

“What do you mean? What’s up with him?” Nora questions, dread overtaking her.

“Do you remember Shelley?”

She nods, her heart plummeting at the look on Miles’ face.

“She died. In childbirth. The baby died too. And Bass -,” Nora shushes him with a wave of her hand, unable to bear the heart-wrenching details. She’d seen them together, had seen how much Bass adored his sweet, friendly, funny wife.

“Things got weird after that. And this is where it stopped,” Miles says wearily.

“But Bass - he isn’t that guy anymore. It destroyed him. What’s left now …” Miles can’t finish the sentence, the pain and regret on his face too profound. “He’s smart, and he’s cunning. But don’t expect him to have a heart, or a conscience,” he explains eventually. “It’s like those things died with her.”

Nora glances over her shoulder in horror, knowing it explains so much, but unwilling to accept such a harsh truth at face value.

“But what’s left, without those things?” she asks, bemused.

Miles looks away as if the answer is unpalatable.

“Our training. Lots of old habits. God complex, like you said.”

She snorts, unsurprised he failed to appreciate the difference.

“Messiah complex, actually. Driven to try and help others, and rescue them from the degradations of their chosen lifestyle. A God complex? That’s something completely different.”

“Not the point, Nora. Steer clear of him if you can. He can be all business, but then something shifts and he’s - different. Very ‘want, take,have.’” Miles admits, and Nora has to look past the Buffy reference to grasp just how serious it is.

But Miles isn’t finished.

“And what he wants is usually what I have,” he says quietly, and her heart breaks for him in that moment, even as her hackles stand up to object. Because he doesn’t have her. And she has every intention of ignoring that little voice that insists on chanting “not yet.”


	6. March 2018

_March 15, 2018: Philadelphia, The Monroe Republic_

“Concussion fuzes, now - that was engineering. There’s not many of them about - just too dangerous for most collectors, but using shockwaves to fire your cannon. C’mon - even you have to admit that is _badass_ ,” Bass chortles, nudging Miles with his shoulder as they stand side by side at the breakfast buffet.

Nora hides her smile, because for all the width of their impressive shoulders under dark blue serge, she can suddenly see the kids they had been, even the dorky teenagers. As they day goes on, the President will bury himself in reports and emerge white around the mouth and hungry for distraction, while the General will snarl at his troops and stomp into disputes and probably end up bloodying his sword. She’s heard lurid rumors about the things that happen in Independence Hall at night, but in the morning, they laugh and joke and she has to treat them like racalcitrant children to get any work done.

She hates the fact that the breakfast briefings are becoming her favorite part of the day. (She can almost pretend they are all friends again.)

Things would coast along smoothly for a week or two, their smiles distant and command cracking in their voices, and she would know where the boundaries had been drawn. She accepts the fact she has a big, black question mark hanging over her head, and they both have a right to be assholes about it. Most days, she takes it.

But then Miles will push a glass of whiskey into her hand, or Bass will ask how Mia is doing in school, or she’ll find a pot of muscle salve pushed down into her bag after she and her sore muscles have winced their way through a briefing. And underneath it all simmers a sexual heat that only intensifies with every day it goes unsatisfied.

“Nora?” 

Nora jerks her attention back to the briefing - and her breakfast - and chews thoughtfully. “I was just thinking about the census,” she offers. “You know, Bass, you might be on to something.”

His face lights up and she jumps in to correct him before he can get too excited. “Not about the concussion fuzes. Cool idea, lousy execution. But the Civil War stuff - that was pre-electric, but full on industrial age. Anything they could do, we should be able to replicate.”

Bass practically froths at the mouth in his enthusiasm for her line of thought, and after thirty minutes of intense discussion on the various classes of artillery used, and the different fuzes employed, Miles ambles off to inspect the day’s new recruits. Bass tells her to prioritise her idea over anything else on her plate, and agrees she should start immediately with a trip to Fort Dix.

“Make sure you take an escort, though Nora - that area still isn’t one hundred percent pacified. Miles would gut me if anything happened to you,” the President beams, then pushes away from the table and is halfway to his office before she can figure out what to say to that.

She throws it back in Miles’ face, later.

Apparently a four man escort wasn’t protection enough, she discovered when Miles stomped in, mood filthy. “Next time you let Bass chase down his pipe dreams himself. You’re not a fucking lackey,” General Matheson had bellowed, already directing his soldiers to clear the facility of any threats.

They wouldn’t find any, Nora told him, because she had already done that and wasn’t goddamn stupid.

“Yeah well, you weren’t trained by me, either,” he sneers, and that’s it. She explodes.

“I wasn’t, huh? Could have fooled me, General. Though maybe it wasn’t your soldier you were training me to be,” Nora sneers, the insinuation thick in her voice. “Either way, you can go and fuck yourself!” 

His backbone stiffens with rage, and she knows she’s gone too far - in front of his soldiers, no less - when he actually tries to calm himself.

His chest shudders with a long, pained breath as his eyes locked on hers, black depths torrid with repressed emotion. “Everyone out. Go set up a perimeter. Now,” he’d barked, and the twenty or so soldiers milling about fell over themselves to escape.

He hadn’t even waited for the noise of their boots to fade away before lowering his face to hers and growling his ultimatum.

“This is your chance to leave. Go, or you’re gonna find out exactly how pissed off I am.”

“I’m not one of your fucking soldiers. You don’t get to dismiss me, you arrogant piece of shit!”

“No? What part of ‘you work for me now’ doesn’t give me that right? _Soldier girl,_ ” he hisses into her ear, then undermines his argument by dragging the rough of his tongue up and over the delicate whorls of her ear. It’s the touch that she’s been dreaming about for too long, the source of so much frustration and sorrow and guilt that control abandons her completely as she hits flashpoint. 

Her infuriated growl seems to galvanise them both, her arms reaching for him as he propels her backwards, crushing her up against the Civil War-era cannon she had been inspecting. His mouth is already blazing a delirious trail down the side of her neck when he lifts his head for a final confirmation. “Stop or go, Nora?”

“You’re not going any-fucking-where,” she gasps, then turns her head to sink her teeth into the callused glory below his thumb, replaying the gesture that had left her aching for him all those years ago. He slams his hips into hers and she discovers that yes, it’s as powerful as it ever was, his cock poking at her belly as the teasing slick of his tongue gives way to a frantic chain of bites.

Their mouths crash together soon after, mewls and pleas filling the air as they try to remove their clothes, but fall victim to the rabbit-hole of long, wet kisses. He has one hand delving inside her bra and the other pulling desperately at her belt when she pushes him away to undo it herself. It clatters to the ground as Nora focuses on unbuttoning and unzipping, pushing jeans and panties down towards her knees in a clumsy, desperate invitation to touch.

She’s shameless, Nora thinks. He makes her shameless, but then Miles makes a noise in the back of his throat, and reclaims her mouth as he presses her back into the antique cannon, and shame is unnecessary and counterproductive anyway, Nora decides.

She’d been inspecting the name plate before he’d arrived, but now the raised letters are warming to the bare skin of her ass, and she has a vision of the heat between them turning everything molten, the name of the cannon branding itself into her skin, and her too dizzy with touch to notice. Their mouths maul each other as his hands drift over her body, relearning all her secrets. She’s thinner than she used to be, she remembers with a pang, more muscled than curved these days, but he still marvels at her breasts, pulling them up over the cups of her bra to let him torture her nipples with tongue and teeth and such unrestrained delight it makes her blush. 

His laugh is hot in her ear as his hands tickle their way down her rib cage, then stroke at the taut lines of her belly before plunging into the welcoming clutch of her sex. They both groan as he slicks his fingers back and forth, back and forth, before angling his hand to help her drive down onto him, two long fingers deep inside, thumb on her clit and little finger tickling at something electric behind. It’s ridiculously, horrendously good, but it’s going to throw her over the edge fast and hard. That won’t be enough - she wants him to rob her of consciousness and conscience alike. 

“Miles,” she gasps, “I need …”

“What, soldier? What do you need?”

“More than your fucking hand,” she snarls, not that it stops her grinding down onto him as he fucks her too slowly, too shallowly. Her eyes are mostly closed, but she knows he’s smirking down into her face, can feel his satisfaction at her predicament.

“So what do you need?”

Nora gives in the urge to wail, madness approaching too fast to care about the needy thread in her voice. “Your cock. Oh, Jesus please. Fuck me properly. Like you used to, Miles, hard and fast. Break me.”

Miles reacts with a hoarse cry that falls somewhere between triumphant and aroused beyond belief. He drops to the ground and yanks off her boots, then drags her jeans clear of her feet, already spinning her to face the cannon as he rises up, fumbling behind her to strip off his own belt and undo his uniform pants. His hands are rough, his voice even rougher as he crushes himself into her backside as if desperate to feel every one of her contours moulding into his.

“Spread for me, Nora.”

The command makes everything inside of her tighten, and she whimpers with anticipation as she widens her stance. Miles rewards her with the electric shock of his cock sliding between her sensitive folds, that blissful intersection of friction and heat that she knows will make her burn. His hands shape her ass, stroking and kneading before he leans over her to find a handhold on the cannon, then nudges her feet even further apart. 

“Now brace, soldier.”

It’s all the warning he gives her before slamming into her, Nora’s guttural moan echoing around them as she gropes for a handhold, fingers clutching desperately at the smooth surface before they tangle with his. Her swollen flesh welcomes the invasion with shudders of satisfaction that run together to make every cell in her body sing. Hidden charges, Nora thinks. Little explosions, a prelude to the real thing.

But she’s lost the ability to think by the time that happens, not a single elegant metaphor to be found, just heat, and friction, and delirium descending as the pleasure unfurls to the point of pain. It clutches at her insides so hard her knees give out, and only the hands clasped on her hips keep her upright as she convulses. He’s saying something, hot words of admiration and lust, but all she’s registering is the way every muscle in his body tenses before he drags his cock free of her channel, burying it between her ass cheeks to spend hot and sticky all over her back. Good, she thinks. At last.

She’ll never run from this again.

  
*  


_She feels her lips twist, and tells herself it’s the pain, not derision. But that girl. So young, so sure - she’d thought that was it. Cue happy ending._

_But they were flame and fuse, ignition and fuel, and that day, mere kindling in the inferno of Miles and Nora. That’s where it really started, though, him and her, the General and Bounty Hunter. Loving and fucking and fighting as the world burned._

_Dios los ayude._

_He would break her, and break her, and break her again, before she truly broke._

  
*  


“Faber? After all this time, you decide you want Faber?”

Nora puts her fork down and starts running the scenarios in her head. She’d been building the dossier ever since she’d sat down with that first stack of warrants, and had come to the same conclusion that Bass and Miles had themselves. John Faber had family in Georgia, had married and Atlanta socialite and they were expecting their second child any day now.

He wouldn’t come willingly to Philadelphia.

“Look. I’m not asking you to abduct the guy. Just get my offer into his hands,” Bass sighs. He’s rubbing at his leg again, and Nora can’t help but flick her eyes up to where Miles is stiffly trying to pour himself another drink. The bulge of bandages is still visible under his uniform, and the sick, panicky feeling that had hit her when she first heard starts to make her head swim once more.

She’d nearly lost him.

Clarity is a bitch when you’ve been trying to live in the land of denial.

After that first time, the passion exploding white hot despite the fact they hadn’t even managed to work their way back to friends, they’d tried to keep it casual. Just physical, she’d assured herself. There weren’t a lot of men out there who revved her engine like the big, bad General, so depriving herself of the chance at some above-average sex just didn’t seem sensible. She was an adult woman, with needs. He was better at fulfilling them than anyone else she had met.

Didn’t mean she was in love with him.

Didn’t mean she was his.

She had told him about Bass’ cheery comment that first day, his odd belief that she and Miles were already involved, and he’d looked stricken. Nora had stopped dead, mouth ajar, completely poleaxed by his overreaction, and he’d tried to handwave it away as concern.

“Look. I warned you. Things between us - it can get weird,” he’d snapped.

From what she’s seen, he was the only one acting weird, but … whatever. She’d never been that girl who needed to haul her boyfriends over the emotional coals, so if he wanted to be paranoid, so be it. Nevertheless, she’d been happy to keep things on the down low, one eye on Bass as they kept their eyes on the documents and their hands to themselves. Nora spent a lot of time at Independence Hall, sure - they’d even found her an office - but she called it headquarters, not home. For nearly two months, she’d kept things professional, preserving the fiction that Miles saw her as just another cog in their increasingly effective military machine.

And when she found herself longing for his company, or unable to concentrate prior to her militia-specific briefing, the one he’d carefully scheduled just before noon? That was just the flush of naughty, illicit sex, the thrill of letting him go down on her in her office when they should have been poring over the latest batch of reports from Georgia. (He complains that her desk is too rickety for him to fuck her properly, so their next briefing will have to be in his office. She tries to remind him why they don’t meet there - Monroe in the adjoining office and their secretaries in the vestibule between - but he smirks at her as he writes the appointment on her planner anyway. At least June and Dianne will be gone by 8pm, she remembers thinking, and crossing her legs at the throb there, because - fuck. They’re asking to get caught.)

She realizes their secret is out on the night when Mia is out of town on a school trip, and Monroe insists she stay for dinner. They’ve barely knocked back a second glass of whiskey afterwards when Monroe excuses himself with a casual goodnight, and she has to accept he has no expectation that she won’t be staying over. Miles just shrugs when she turns questioning eyes on him, then kisses her knuckles.

“Yeah, so that happened. Wanna take advantage of it?”

She did. And they did, and just like that, she’d found herself spending more of her nights in General Matheson’s bed than she did her own.

And then Trenton happens, and everything changes again.

_I nearly lost him. I nearly lost him. I nearly lost him. ___

Nora had been in the armory inspecting the latest haul of ammunition from the military bases they’d just won down south when she’d heard two guards gossiping in the halls. 

“Medics have gone out to bring in Matheson. Monroe’s threatened to kill them all if he doesn’t make it.”

She’d still been goggling at the idea anyone would think Monroe capable of cold-blooded murder like that when the first half of the sentence sunk in. Miles. Miles was hurt.

They’d worked on him for hours as she waited in the hall, Monroe emerging white faced every so long to give her updates. When he’d led her inside, she’d nearly crumpled to the floor to see Miles - invincible Miles, badass Miles - looking so weak. He was approaching 40, she knew, and sometimes he pokes fun at her for dating an older man, but she’s never seen it, not before now. His face is carved into lines as stern and unyielding as any deathmask, and its only the faint jerk and hiss of his breath that tells her he is alive.

And yet, here they are, barely a month later, Miles on his feet, if less than steadily. Bass watching him like a hawk, refusing to let him return to active duty until he can take a breath without wincing.

It’s going to be a very long month, not withstanding the fact that it’s Christmas, and at some point she might even have to go home, and spend some quality time with her sister. Mia is keeping her snarky little comments to herself for a change, even asking how Miles was recovering when she bought Nora a bunch of clothes from the house so she wouldn’t have to be away from him for too long. It’s a big change from the girl who had called her cheap whore for daring to let the General put his hands on her body.

She’d wondered if Mia was somehow right, at the time. She still didn’t like the fact their livelihoods were dependent on her lover’s goodwill, or that she found herself with her fingers in so many objectionable pies. But then Bass told her to pause her munitions work to find a family lost in the fog of war; and Miles had released half of the militia for the harvest, code for “go home and see your families,” and she’d seen the goodness in them, the humanity both men usually did their best to hide.

And then she’d nearly lost him. Both of them, if the rumors are correct.

She’d heard all sorts of things in the wake of the battle, but in those early days, had been too focused on Miles getting through the days and hours to care. It’s nearly a month later, Miles just starting to hobble around with a cane, when Bass asks her to put together a file on exactly what had happened at Trenton. She interviews more than one hundred soldiers to get their accounts, but it’s the men fighting closest to Bass and Miles who have the most interesting tale to tell.

“General Matheson was basically holding his guts inside his body,” one young Corporal had related, wide-eyed. “And then General Monroe says, ‘no brother, you hang on! If you’re dying here, I’m dying with you!’ And he runs out into the line of fire to set up cover for the medics to come through and collect General Matheson, and Jesus miss, he should have been dead! The way he scooped up -”

Nora suspects she might have been turning green when the kid had jerked to a halt. Bass had invited her to sit with him at Miles’ bedside not long after he’d regained consciousness, but she hadn’t been made aware of the severity of his injuries. She knows, now, and even though its been weeks, even though Miles is on his feet and actually eating again, the knowledge that she’d nearly lost him still paralyses her. And when she looks at Bass, she can seem the same fear and desperation staring back at her from bloodshot blue eyes.

He doesn’t let it stop him, though. With Miles out of action, Bass is working twice as hard, leading the Militia as well as seeing to the day to day running of the country. And he’s doing a pretty good job, she has to admit, with the Republic lurching towards war with Texas, and trying to settle things on the northern border in the wake of Trenton. They’d reclaimed the city from a group who’d moved in from the north spouting stuff about how it all belonged to Canada anyway. Canadians used to be nice, Bass had tried to remind them, but once Miles had been hurt … they hadn’t had a chance. Now the Monroe Republic doesn’t have a northern neighbor fit to challenge it, and what’s calling itself Canada has been exiled up into the permafrost.

It wasn’t just General Matheson who could be brutal, their neighbours were learning. The silver lining of the bitter battle at Trenton had been just how effectively Bass’ fury at nearly losing Miles had transformed the usually cool, remote President into a howling inferno on the front lines. Trenton would be remembered as Monroe’s victory, rather than Matheson’s, and that had been a revelation for many of the newer recruits who’d only ever known him as the President.

Something between Miles and Bass had shifted then, and Nora is still trying to figure out what. Logic would suggest that General Matheson could be a bit tetchy about having his supremacy over the militia challenged, but … she didn’t think that was it. No matter what it looked like to everyone else, the President and his General still saw themselves as partners in everything, their country included. If anything, since Trenton, they seemed closer. And if Bass is worried about Miles, Miles is worrying right back.

Bass doesn’t do well when he’s working too hard, Miles keeps grumbling, and for God’s sake, at least delegate some of the domestic stuff to Jeremy, or Neville. Bass needs to fucking relax. Get laid or something, he smirks, making Bass look away with a grimace.

“You are way too invested in Bass’ sex life,” Nora jokes. “Maybe he just wants to focus on running the country? Getting laid isn’t the be all and end all.”

“You don’t know Bass the way I do,” Miles sneers. “Probably putting more thought into how to get us into bed than anything else.”

Nora blinks. 

Miles had said “us.”

As in - the both of them. Not just predatory Bass chasing after his best friend’s girl for some unexplained reason.

_… he wants what I have …_

Something claws at her belly and she tells herself that the President’s behavior is so erratic that Miles can’t read him anymore. Some days he’s almost the Bass he used to be, the layer of ice thawing enough so that they can see the man surviving underneath. Other days he is a powder keg, just waiting for someone to set a light to his irrational fury. But he’s at his best when it’s just them, just Bass and Miles and Nora, and she’s had no reason to doubt him.

Just the other night he’d caught her in the hall outside Miles’ room, barely decent in a too-large robe and nothing underneath. His eyes had travelled down the length of her legs and had burned their way all the way back to her face, but when he raised an eyebrow it was at the stash of cookies she had swiped from the kitchen. Then he’d asked if he could come in to see Miles for a moment and followed her inside to quiz him about the weapons inventory.

Miles had been sitting up in bed, bare under the sheet, and Bass had dropped down next to him to share the report he’d been looking at. Her mouth goes dry now as she remembers the way his hand had lingered on her lover’s bare shoulder. It had been something about how many guns one Marine could actually need, and she’d laughed at the time but now …

She looks back, and a new lens shows her something different.

Something she can’t believe she hasn’t seen before, but was always there. Bass looks at Miles exactly the same way she does, all heat and want, and Miles shifts under his scrutiny, uncomfortable. But when Bass isn’t looking, his gaze shifts back, and there’s a question there. Longing. Maybe even desire.

But then his face settles into the hard, baleful mask he wears as General Matheson, and he’s mean, after that. Punishing Bass, she realises, for making Miles want something he’ll never allow himself to have.

How long, she wonders, before he starts to punish her for not being Bass?

*

_She dreamed about it for months, afterwards. A train, hurtling towards them through a tunnel, blinding them with a single huge headlight. A swamp, alligators everywhere, huge jaws lunging around to snap at her feet. A drum, not one of the little ones they used to keep time in the militia, but something huge and deep, boom, boom, boom, every heartbeat a moment closer to their inevitable doom._

_She should have left then. But she was young, and the instincts scratching at her were new, and untried. Every time he smiled at her, every time he groaned her name, he was making a choice. Choosing her, Nora convinced herself. She was already halfway in love with him, and she was too damn stupid to see the big picture, because in some ways, it made it easier, knowing about Bass._

_They called each other ‘brother’, and in those first, horrified days, she’d assumed they were hiding from the truth. But now she understands. You can cut yourself free of a lover, or a friend._

_Family is family no matter how bad things get._


	7. July 2019

_ _

 

_July 10, 2019: Philadelphia, The Monroe Republic_

School finishes in May and by mid-summer, Mia is begging to be allowed to hunt bounties on her own. Nora had tried to steer her towards something less dangerous - the Republic is desperate for doctors and nurses, and Mia has known how to stitch a wound since she was 13 - but her little sister point blank refused to contemplate any more school. Nora had done her best to remember what it felt like to be 18 and newly liberated, but it had been a different world. And it wasn’t like Mia was wrong.

She has grown up knowing the tricks of the trade, and is damn good at it. Her baby sister was born smart and resourceful, and the life they’ve lived has made her ruthless and cunning. There’s no way to admit that Nora hates herself for that, not without coming off critical of the person Mia is becoming. But she had to watch as Mia’s innocence was ripped away the first time, and couldn’t do a damn thing about it. So excuse her if she refuses to sit back and watch every job make her beautiful, loving sister that little bit harder.

“I need you to be safe,” she had tried to explain, but was barely finished her sentence before her sister was on her feet, fists balled by her side, seething with rage.

“Safe, sitting pretty in school, listening to the gossip about how my big Sis is probably fucking General Matheson and General Monroe? Safe, at home by myself, because you’re up at Independence Hall day in, day out figuring out how to kill more people? Or just safe, as in, tucked away somewhere where you don’t have to spare me a thought at all? Is that the kind of safe you want, Nora?”

Nora’s chest had tightened at the accusation. That, at least, was fresh guilt, not something so deep in the past that she couldn’t do a damn thing about it. She hadn’t been spending enough time at home, she knew that, but her boyfriend is the goddamn General of the Republic. He’s busy, and when he was actually home in Philadelphia, every moment they could steal for each other was precious. But it was her sister she was stealing those moments from, her sister who was left alone too often. (She thinks. Nora had caught the tail end of a giggly conversation where Mia was telling her best friend about some boy she liked; if her sister has male company every now and then, well. It’s not an argument Nora is going to win when she’s spending more nights at Miles’ bed than she does her own.) So bringing her into the office, finding her an office of her own, seemed the logical thing to do.

She was a little bit shocked at just how enthusiastically Mia had settled into tracking down the tax evaders, deserters, bigamists and petty criminals whose warrants drifted across her desk. And then she started to actually find them.

“It’s not like he’s violent - he cooked the books to give Militia conscripts a little more grain in their ration. He’s basically an accountant, Nora!” Mia argues, hands flailing about for emphasis. “Two days, max three. You won’t even know I’m gone.”

Nora is launching into her second round of protests when a muffled snort alerts them to their audience. Miles is all General Matheson in his austere black uniform, even if she can see the amusement twitching at the corner of his mouth, but Bass isn’t even bothering to hide his grin.

“Should we come back later?”

“No. This argument is over,” Nora snaps, throwing the offending warrant down on her desk before crossing to Miles to raise her face for a kiss. “You’re back early.”

“New recruits are so bad I felt mean yelling at them,” Miles shrugs. “Not a problem you have, obviously.”

“We weren’t yelling,” Nora corrects primly, then turns to Mia. “Were we?”

Mia is too busy goggling at Bass to answer the question at first. “Were we what?”

“Never mind,” Nora sighs, wondering how long it will be before Mia gets over her disgustingly obvious crush. She wonders if Mia remembers the curses she’d flung at them just two years ago, damning Nora to hell and back for taking her into the belly of the beast, as she’d called it. Every sin on the face of the earth had been blamed on ‘that bastard Monroe’, but now, she’s sneaking glances up at him from under her lashes.

Miles is still on her shitlist, though. She glowers when he tells Bass that Mia has just finished school, and is spending the summer helping Nora out.

“Excellent,” the President purrs. “Good bounty hunters are useful to have around, but the problem with Nora is she has so many other skills. We keep her very busy.”

Nora feels herself flushing at the carefully planted innuendo, and practically bares her teeth at Bass in response. She would demand he stop, except that might require a close examination of exactly why the President finds it so amusing that the gossips insist he’s sharing a lover with his General. Perhaps the fact that it pisses Miles off is enough. Maybe he just likes it better than the other rumor, the one where she’s merely a smokescreen.

“Well, somebody has to keep an eye on the enemies of the state when you two are off playing toy soldiers,” she smiles sweetly, then returns her attention to the sheaf of warrants on her desk. “There seem to be more every day.”

Nora frowns, suddenly confronted by the uncomfortable realisation. She hadn’t bothered to think about it before, but in the two years she’s been here, the number of warrants that cross her desk has nearly doubled. And lately, there’s a whole new category of offender that has popped up. “Suspected Rebel.” When did the Monroe Republic become a place where even suspicion of wanting to rebel against the government was enough to get your face on a wanted poster?

Even more reason for Mia not to be gallivanting out there on her own, Nora frowns. If there were Rebels out there, looking to knock the Generals off their thrones, then anyone associated with them might be considered fair game. There’s no way -

“Let’s test you out on tracking down that accountant, Mia. I’ll assign you a couple of privates from the household guard for back up, and if you can bring this guy in, they’re yours to keep,” Bass says, neatly cornering them both.

“Make sure you speak to Neville about adding Mia to the payroll,” he tells Nora, his glee at thwarting her making her teeth hurt.

But when Mia brings the first guy in, then makes another capture in the same week, Nora can’t help but think her sister was paying more attention than she ever realised.

(Maybe she was the one who hadn’t been paying attention.)

  
*

_“Nora Clayton! Nora …. Clayton! We have your sister! We … have … Mia!”_

_Ice swims through her veins as she struggles to comprehend. Mia is safe in Georgia. No one in Philadelphia even knows Mia Clayton is still alive. It’s a ruse._

_But she’s moving anyway, jogging towards the voice, abandoning the shadows for the trap she knows is waiting. It doesn’t matter. They have her sister. She’s not about to turn her back on Mia again._

_Miles pulls her back, tells her to wait, tells her they’ll get Mia out. To trust him._

_Does she trust him? Can she, with this? After everything?_

_He’d come through for Mia before. Never for her, but for Mia, yes._

_He only hurts the ones he loves._

_Nora breathes out, surrenders to his plan, and never once thinks to ask why, or how long._

  
*

“Do you ever think about trying to track down Dad?” Mia asks as they are riding towards the rendezvous point, the neat rows of tents marching up the next hill a welcome confirmation they are finally getting close. Nora hasn’t seen Miles in a month, and she’s liquid with the thought of his mouth, his hands on her body, and distraction makes her needlessly cruel.

“No. Figure he has to be dead,” she shrugs, eyes searching the hillside up ahead. There - the General’s tent, right at the centre, their M flying overhead, testifying to Miles’ presence. “Why?”

Mia is staring at her in shock. “Because he’s our father? Our only family?”

The accusation in her warm brown eyes stirs Nora’s conscience more than she’s comfortable with. Family is everything. Mama had taught them that, before she died to keep them safe.

“If he’s still alive, he’ll probably be in Texas somewhere, and we’re at war with Texas,” she points out gently. “We don’t have free passage over there, especially if they find out who we are.”

“Who you are, you mean,” Mia scoffs. “And it’s not like you’re his wife or anything. Hardly anyone outside the Republic knows what you look like - just your name. The General and his Bounty Hunter,” she says, wrinkling her nose.

She makes it sound like something dirty, Nora fumes. No better than the General and his mistress. But it’s not like that. They’re not like that. She’s a part of his life, and he’s a part of hers. And because of who he is - who they are - that means her life is here, in the Republic, now.

Nora smiles as they ride into the camp, Miles pushing a soldier out of his way to take her horse’s reins himself. “Babe.”

“General,” she smiles, then slides off the horse to tumble into his arms.

Her last thought before she falls asleep, sticky and twice-sated, is that maybe she and Mia can find their father one day.

When the Republic takes Texas.

  
*

It’s an ancient Greek recipe, something she read about once, and it takes nearly six months to gather the ingredients. It sticks to everything in its path, and what doesn’t catch fire is eaten away by the acid base. They ship it out to the fronts in reinforced barrels, a long, creaking wagon train of death.

Nora travels down to the southern front to see her invention in action. Baker is agog at the results, and in the week she is there, they plant the Monroe flag over six new border towns. They celebrate with champagne and freshly shot steaks.

Miles would have fucked her senseless, Nora thinks as she salutes Jeremy over the table. Her smirk fades as her annoyance comes rushing back - Chicago would have been a better test bed. And since when did Miles want to keep her out of danger?

“He’s a dick,” Monroe had shrugged. “Texas campaign probably needs you more, though.”

He’d been right, of course, but it still stung a little bit. She hadn’t seen Miles in two months, and as far as she was concerned, that was two months too long considering she didn’t think they should be bothering with Chicago at all. The damn city crawls with the type of mercenaries and cutthroats they’d worked hard to drive out of the Monroe Republic, and extending their western border that far out - she’d told him, over and over, that it had the potential to become a giant millstone around their necks.

She is back in Philadelphia, waiting to hear how her new weapon had performed in Miles’ campaign, when the worry starts to set in. Two weeks without a word - especially when they are testing something of hers - is unprecedented. Not to mention against every protocol Miles has established for his militia.

Nora kicks herself for choosing to stay at Independence Hall just because Mia was out of town chasing down a notorious swindler. The big bed is far too wide and cold without Miles in it, and every tread on the stairs has her sitting up, sure it will be a messenger at last. On the mantle across the room, the steady progression of the long hand on the clock taunts her.

It’s two in the morning when she finally succumbs to the golden light seeping from underneath the door connecting the bedroom to the private library Miles shares with Bass. She’ll just check he didn’t leave a candle burning, she tells herself.

Bass is sprawled in one of the chairs by the fire, the piles of reports surrounding him obviously having lost his attention to the bottle of whiskey he’s working his way through.

“Everything okay?”

He turns to look her over with heavy-lidded eyes. “Yeah. Just the usual. Can’t sleep?”

“When was the last time you heard from Miles?”

He winces and drags a hand through his already disordered crop of curls.

“Was trying to figure that out myself. Thought maybe I’d missed something - ‘daily dispatches, Bass, it’s gotta be daily, even if they take two weeks to get there. That way we know if there’s a break in the chain!’

His imitation of Miles’ growly baritone is so mocking that the giggle slips out in spite of the topic. “And?”

“Nothing since last Tuesday. You?”

“I had a note with the munitions report I got last Sunday. But nothing since.”

“He usually writes you more often, right?”

Nora bites her lip in confirmation. “Yeah.”

“Dammit.”

Bass rises to grab a glass from the sideboard, and pours her a measure.

“I’ll wait to see if anything arrives tomorrow, then I’ll head over there myself. Chicago is - Miles is pretty damn keen to bring it into the fold. Hope he hasn’t done something stupid.”

Nora wrinkles her nose, remembering the argument she’d had with Miles before he left. General Matheson is rational to fault, but there is nothing rational about his lust for Chicago. He talks about making it their most westerly outpost, the last gasp - or first gulp - of Monroe Republic stability, depending on whether you were coming or going from the Plains. More logical than their usual unashamed expansionism, Nora has to concede, and she can’t really say it isn’t true. But, there’s something about it, something … it just feels like more than that.

This careful, patient campaign just isn’t Miles - any other city that had defied General Matheson this long would be in ashes by now. But for some reason he’s not sharing, he seems to need Chicago whole and functioning. Wants to lock it up tighter than Philly itself, to stamp his control on every back alley and rabbit warren. Oversight, her instincts mutter, and her breath catches in her throat.

He’s keeping tabs on someone. Someone who hasn’t been mentioned in the official dispatches, doesn’t have a warrant out for his or her arrest, but was important enough for him to conquer several thousand square miles to find. To extend the boundaries of their goddamn empire just to bring him - or her - into their sphere of influence.

Without telling her. Their resident specialist in finding people. Why?

She wants to believe it’s logic that whispers of another woman, but it’s just as likely to be paranoia. Whatever the source, she feels it in her bones, and when she lifts her head to catch Bass’ watchful blue gaze, she sees immediately that she’s right. His mouth twitches with chagrin, and he looks away to stare into the fire.

“There’s a specific objective in Chicago that’s top secret, Nora. I’m going to head out there and see how he’s getting on myself.”

She snorts.

“Top secret, my ass. You don’t need to cover for him, Bass. If Miles wants to play away, I’ll deal with that when he gets back. I just want to know he’s alive, the bastard.”

Bass pushes himself out of the chair to stand next to her, eyes somehow sympathetic even as he looms close in warning.

“It’s not what you think, Nora. It’s something I’ve asked him to do, something we need for the good of the Republic. But - he’s going to be in a strange place when he gets back. He’s going to need you.”

The ache in her heart makes her careless.

“Like he needs me for anything more than a quick fuck. He’s got you for everything else.”

It clangs between them, and his face shifts into the cold mask she thinks of as President Monroe.

“What makes you think he hasn’t got me for that too?”

She gapes up at him, unable to believe he’s finally broached the taboo that hangs so heavily between them.

“Don’t look so shocked. Hasn’t he been telling you what a pervert I am? Always trying to get him and his girlfriends into my bed?”

She stills at the silky menace in his voice, gooseflesh rising at the throb of imminent danger. He’s no longer Bass, the man who had blanched at the sight of those little girls the night they rescued Mia, or who had seemed to know more silly campfire songs than anyone else in those years when they desperately needed to laugh. He’s someone else now, she knows, even if that radiant smile he uses as a weapon now sometimes makes her forget.

“I -”

“You’re a lousy liar, Nora. I can see it all over your face. But here’s the thing you need to know about me - I’m not ashamed of what I am. Or who I love.”

His fiery blue eyes demand that she follows him to the undeniable conclusion. But Miles is.

“And if you need me to say it, I will. Yes, I’m in love with your dickweed of a boyfriend. Always have been. I get to that point where I think I’m over him, that I can give myself to someone else, and then my luck turns to shit and Miles is there and it starts all over again. So yeah, Nora, if it’s a quick fuck he’s after, I’m an option and he damn well knows it.”

“But he chose you. And for what it’s worth, I think he did good. Miles has exquisite taste and you’re actually a decent human being, so I’ll stay out of your way. But you need to have a little fucking faith in him, okay? Because if he ends up in my room drunk and hurting, I will give him exactly what he’s looking for, Nora. Even though he always hates me afterwards.”

The scorn in his voice is no longer for her, Nora realises slowly. It’s himself that he’s warning off; his own need that he is mocking. She reaches for him and he wheels on her, warding her off with wild swing that testifies to his misdirected fury that’s eating him alive.

“And for the record? It was never me who wanted a girl between us, Nora. I just did what he needed me to do, just to get whatever fucking crumbs he was willing to give me. And if you think you’re gonna get anything more than that, you are fooling yourself. Miles Matheson wouldn’t know a goddamn feeling if he fell over it,” Bass snarls, so much raw hurt spitting off him that Nora can’t decide want she wants to do more - hug him, slap him, or hide in a corner and cry.

  
*

It’s Mia who tells her.

She’s uncharacteristically quiet one night at dinner, watching Nora from under her lashes and smiling so falsely that you’d think she was starring in some sort of sitcom. They are washing and drying the dishes together when Nora finally runs out of patience. “What?”

“What do you mean, what?”

“What the hell is wrong, Mia? Why are you acting so weird.”

Her sister swallows as she drags the worn piece of cotton over their earthenware plates.

“Uh -”

Nora simply raises an eyebrow.

“Okay. It’s just a rumour, right? I haven’t had a real chance to confirm it yet, right? Miles-is-keeping-a-woman-prisoner-in-the-Stratton-house.”

Mia rushes the words out in such a hurried jumble that it takes her long moment to decode them.

“Miles is keeping someone prisoner? A woman?”

“Yeah. A blonde woman. Rachel someone. At the Stratton house.”

General Matheson’s official residence. The one he didn’t use because he liked to live in Independence Hall.

Or so she thought.

Was ‘prisoner’ some sort of code for ‘mistress?’ Did he sleep with this Rachel when he wasn’t with her? Did - oh God - did this woman even have a choice? Nora tells herself that she’s over-reacting, that Miles wouldn’t force any woman, much less one of his prisoners, no matter how complicate it was. But it doesn’t help. She has to clamp her hand over her mouth to keep her half-digested dinner down. She needs to meet this woman. She needs to _know_.

But there’s nothing that can prepare her for the shock of ice-cold blue eyes and a cool, smooth hand in her own as the other woman looks her up and down and smirks knowingly.

“Nice to meet you, Nora. I’m Rachel. Rachel Matheson.”

His sister-in-law, Miles rushes to explain, but she’s not blind. He can barely look at her, infecting every conversation they have with a dark, snarling regret that might as well spell ‘I cheated’ in huge, neon letters. And his usual snarkiness hardens into irascibility, snarling putdowns that seem custom-designed to make Nora hate him. And Bass, she notices. And maybe even Rachel.

  
*

_Sadness creeps in. Peace is beckoning, the bliss of forgetfulness, and not caring. But she’s not ready to take it, not yet. Nora fights. She refuses to let these be her last memories. Not when there’s still good to come._

_But so much bad, her soul quails. They tore her apart._

_I survived, she snarls. I found a reason to live._

_I am not scared._


	8. November 2022

_November 9, 2022: Philadelphia, The Monroe Republic._

She wakes up slowly, already smiling. Miles is wall of heat behind her, one long hand burrowed between her thighs and the other clutching possessively at one breast. They’d snuck away from the party around midnight, Nora running barefoot through the halls as soon as she could slip out of her strappy heels, the gossamer-spun gown streaming out behind her. He’d caught her at the door to his suite, pinning her up against it, heedless of the guard at the end of the hall as he filled his hands with bunches of fabric, trying to get underneath.

“We could do this in bed, you know,” Nora had laughed, her head still spinning with champagne and the long night of behaving herself in front of the Militia’s officers and their wives. “If we were on the other side of the door, I could take it off. Slowly,” she enunciated, pulling at his earlobe with her teeth.

“Oh, you’re leaving it on. The white against your skin - it’s fucking sublime,” he hisses, leaving her blinking at the touch of poetry. “You’re gonna ride me, so I can see those pretty titties bounce their way out of this gorgeous excuse of a dress,” he said, sliding one hand inside the plunging neckline to cup her bare breast in his callused palm. “Been thinking about it for hours.”

Bass throws Miles a Birthday Ball every year on the Saturday night prior to his birthday. It was fun, once, the chance to dress up and dance and drink something other than their ubiquitous whiskey. But Miles and Bass hadn’t been able to bridge the distrust that Rachel sows so masterfully, and Nora’s nerves are left ragged by the task of playing intermediary between her lover and the man she knows is in love with him. And with Miles away chasing intelligence on a rumored rebel movement gathering strength in the southeast, she and Bass had been working more closely together.

They’re approaching something dangerously close to becoming friends, and it’s been killing her, because he’s not alright. He was usually restless and distracted when Miles was away from Philadelphia, but this past few weeks, it had been more than that. Dark bags under the President’s eyes tell her he hasn’t been sleeping, and his curly hair is constantly disheveled. There’s a manic edge to his behavior that worried her, and when Miles clattered into the forecourt three days after Halloween, Bass had shocked the entire assembled company by sprinting down the stairs to pull his General into a bear hug.

Miles had blinked in surprise and patted him gingerly, raising an eyebrow in her direction in question as he offers the President a manly backslap. Nora widens her eyes to tell him she has no idea what’s going on, but he was already moving to her, arms outstretched for her welcome. She had hidden her face in Miles’ chest rather than force herself to watch Bass’ joy turn to hurt and resentment, and when Miles had ignored the throng to kiss her, it had been embarrassingly easy to succumb to the wash of heat that seems to evaporate her other concerns.

Sort of, Nora sighs. She hadn’t forgotten, exactly, just gotten sick of tiptoeing through her life as if she’d planted a minefield all around their feet. They’d still been burning bright when she’d found the long, white gown and a lavish selection of matching accessories laid out in her office the morning of the Ball. The warm caress of raw silk against her most sensitive places leaves her liquid and wanting even before the Ball starts, and when General Matheson’s eyes darken just on seeing her … they press themselves together as they dance, and find themselves gravitating towards the dark corners of the room where they can pretend to ignore the hundreds of sets of eyes watching their every move.

Even as President Monroe offers Miles a birthday toast, they have their legs entangled under the table, her fingertips trailing up and down his thigh, the heel of her hand making rhythmic passes over the head of his increasingly swollen cock. Bass had waffled on about their achievements, their plans, the future of their Republic, and beside her, Miles had shifted in his seat in seeming embarrassment.

Maybe that was what caused Bass to call a halt to his speech, seemingly mid-flow. He’d looked at them, something silent and profound passing between the two men, then wheeled away from the podium to grab the bottle of whiskey sat in the middle of their table.

“Here’s to you on your almost-birthday, brother,” he said, sloshing it into two glasses and raising it high in a salute. “I’ve got your back.”

Miles stood to take his glass, and they’d stared at each other for a long minute before slamming them back near simultaneously. Once, they might have settled into throwing back whiskey the entire night, but this - that’s not what this is, Nora realises suddenly. It’s a declaration of sorts, a subtle reopening of the lines of communication as they call detente.

Getting drunk together will no doubt come later.

Monroe blinds the room with his dazzling grin, the twinkle in his eyes suggesting it might even be vaguely authentic. “That’s the official part of the evening done. Now you two can disappear to celebrate the way you really want to,” he smirked, tipping his glass towards them in a wry salute.

The room exploded into scandalised laughter, and Nora could only smile along and pray her dark skin hadn’t betrayed the burning heat of her blush. Miles sketched a mocking bow at his long time best friend, and proceeded to dig them even deeper.

“Thank you, President Monroe. I’m mobilising a strike team to march south next week, so my favorite adviser and I will need plenty of … planning time,” he said, deadpan. No one in the room was unaware of her status as his lover, but it had never been paraded quite like this, either. Nora refused to let herself ponder what it might mean - four years of wanting more, then less, then more had taught her to grab the happy times and walk away when she needed to. Even as Miles and Nora, they weren’t easy people; bring the General and the Bounty Hunter into the equation, and sometimes, there were just too many balls to keep in the air.

Not that night, though.

Miles hadn’t wanted to let go of her long enough to say the necessary goodbyes to his staff, so Nora had nodded and made small talk all the way around the room before they’d been able to head back to Bass to take their leave. The President pulled her close to kiss her cheek before turning to Miles.

“Enjoy,” he’d said, and their identical smirks threw her back nine years, to a camp in a Louisiana field, and the pair of best friends who’d still managed to laugh in the face of those first, shellshocked months after the Blackout. As long as Bass and Miles could still look at each other and immediately know what the other was thinking, things would be okay, Nora had told herself.

Okay, maybe even working it’s way back to good.

After their careening their way up the hall, more drunk on each other than anything else they’d had to drink, and nearly embarrassing themselves up against his door, Nora had scrabbled blindly for the knob as his mouth made love to her neck. They’d fallen backwards into the room, the momentum leaving Nora sprawled on her backside on the rug as Miles bore down on top of her. “Hold on,” he grunted, rolling over onto his back and bringing her with him in a wave of white silk, hands already busy underneath.

He’d been so huge and hard underneath her, Nora remembers breathlessly, that it had been like their first time all over again, her body clenching and shuddering even before he ripped away her panties with eager hands. She had wrestled him out of his dress pants just enough to let her crawl into his lap and sink down, both of them groaning at the _close, so close_ of it after a long night of sensual torture.

Later, they had made love slowly, their foreheads touching and hands intertwined over her head as he stroked her to a succession of peaks, but it was that first, furious fuck that had left had left her marked and aching.

Good, she thinks fiercely. It’s been too long since she’s felt properly his. Rachel …

She tries to force her wandering thoughts back to Miles, the wicked things he did to her last night, the heavy weight of cock and balls nestling into the cleft of her buttocks. She could wake him, she thinks, clinging to the feeling, but thoughts of Rachel have already killed the twist of arousal in her belly. That woman, Nora thinks viciously. The icy blonde is a spectre haunting her, day and night.

Any sympathy she has felt for the woman has long since waned in the face of her stony silence about knowing why - or how - the electricity went out. Miles had told her how he and Bass had been on the highway that night when Ben had called just minutes before it happened. He’d babbled something about how it was all going to stop, and they hadn’t even finished the call before the car coasted to a stop. Ben had known what was going to happen, Miles swore, and if Ben knew, so did Rachel. 

“She was his doctoral supervisor,” Miles had explained. “Head of the lab he was working in. And I remember Ben bitching about her not spending enough time with the kids, so she sure as hell wasn’t just a housewife,” he says darkly. 

“She’s got kids?” Nora had asked, and Miles hadn’t wanted to talk after that, bitterness cloaking him like a black cloud.

_”Stay with me. Nora! Don’t leave me,” the girl pleads, and she’s family, this one, all spine and fury with a shining heart that puts the others to shame. Charlie, she thinks. For you, I’d stay. If only I could._

Nora has never believed in avoiding an issue, or letting a coward off the hook, but the questions that taunt her can’t have any answers that will help her accept the situation they’ve found themselves in. Rachel Matheson, she decides, is an honored guest of the Republic, and Nora will do her damnedest to make sure her employers remember that. Even if it yanks her heart out to watch Miles watching the woman, so many emotions chasing across his face that his fists clench in confusion. 

And then his anger breaks loose, a savage thing that abuses furniture and yells at the guards and has him spewing profanities every time he attempts to drag information out off her. Nora worries about what’s going to happen when Miles succumbs General Matheson, the man with so much blood on his hands he sees no point in pretending they’re clean. So many lines in the sand that they’ve marched straight across, but this one, surely, would be too far. So she goes to see Rachel herself, talks science and engineering and all the puzzles of the world they’ve lost. And still the woman sneers.

She had been invited to join their table, but in the end had declined to emerge from her suite at all. “I’m not about to pretend to be happy to be here,” she’d said coolly, her eyes mocking as she eyed Nora in her long, white dress. She’d smiled then, and Nora had braced for the blow that was sure to come.

Nora can’t remember what she said in reply, and she tells herself that it doesn’t matter, not when her lover is still snuggled into her body, their passion still sticky on her thighs. And not when she’s seen that stare Rachel levels at Bass, full of the sort of loathing that suggests this is an old, old argument, and Nora a latecomer to the party.

Besides, they’ve been navigating a new normal, where Bass manages to smile when Miles pulls her into his body, and teases them about acting like old marrieds. And Nora feels secure enough to make a wisecrack about the two of them being the true married couple, and everyone knowing it.

It was Miles who had gone white at that, and Nora had cursed herself for forgetting how they’d found themselves here. “Sorry, bad joke,” she had muttered, then made an excuse about needing to find Mia to talk dresses.

Bass’ uncanny blue eyes had collided with her own as she made her escape, and she’d wondered, then, what that measuring, anticipatory look might mean. Weighing the odds, she thinks now. Wondering what the hell might happen if he changes the rules of the game.

The dress is still strewn across the end of the bed in a swathe of white silk. It’s probably soiled, Nora thinks regretfully, the way Miles had refused to let her take it off until he’d seen her above him, and under him, and on her hands and knees with the silk billowing around them both as he’d pistoned into her with a force that had shoved the bed halfway across the floor. The daring dress, the naughty scraps of underwear, the diamond teardrop that now sat snug in her navel … Miles had let loose a string of fervent curses when he’d seen them, as if she was his fantasy come true.

Bass, she acknowledges slowly, is the history buff. The one who collects relics from the Roman Empire, and looks to Plato for political insight, and would love to see them crowned in olive wreaths like the Caesars of old. And who probably knows exactly what Miles likes most.

A peace offering, she concludes. A carefully presented tableau of erotic promise, from the Emperor to his favorite. Welcome home General, your concubine awaits.

She should probably be offended, being used as a playing piece in someone else’s game, but right now she’s too sated to care. She’ll think about it later, Nora promises herself as she snuggles in closer. If she’s going to be used as a pawn, she’ll wants to know why. And what the hidden objective might be.

  
*  


Bass is already immersed in reports by the time they make it down to breakfast. “Good morning,” he says warily, and her heart lifts when Miles smirks back. She hadn’t realised how much she had missed their snarky interplay until in had dissolved in the face of endless arguments. Bass is usually the first one to bite, but Miles hoards grudges like gold, and the result is small-scale warfare. 

Last year, hostilities hadn’t even ceased for either of their birthdays. This year is already better, Nora reminds herself.

“A very good morning,” she says softly. “Thank you for the beautiful dress.”

His smile is simultaneously bashful and wicked. “I’m glad you liked it.”

Miles looks from Bass to Nora and then back to Bass. “You gave Nora that dress?”

Bass stares at Miles for a moment as if waiting for him to pounce. Then he nods warily. “Drexel was all out of fancy swords and old whiskey,” he shrugs.

Miles makes a sharp sound of mirth that tempts Nora to kick him in the shins. She does object to being framed as his birthday present - it’s the principle of the thing - but … the dress. And what followed. Damn afterglow. 

“Can’t wait to see what you get me for my birthday,” she says coolly, then punches Miles for the smile that spreads across his face. “Should I put in an order for a younger model now?”

And now I do feel old,” Miles intones, crossing to the breakfast buffet to pour a measure into his coffee. “Got something up your sleeve to cure that, Bass?”

“

Just their friendship, Nora observes. Just them, back again, strong.

“Say the word and I’ll stick you behind a desk,” the President jokes, then slaps Miles with a rolled up report. “Pretty sure the fountain of youth is hiding somewhere in Tom Neville’s despatches.”

“Unlike anything approaching the unvarnished truth,” Miles snorts. “He really think these idiots are a threat? Pissed off farmers and shopkeepers annoyed they have to cough up actual gold for tax?”

Bass takes a gulp of his coffee as he stares down into the courtyard. “Apparently they’ve taken the old US flag as some sort of identifying marker. They’re all about bringing back the US of A.”

Miles gapes at him in amazement. “What’s to bring back? Hey, we’re US Marines. We’d be the first to report for duty if there was anyone to report to. And they think by overthrowing us they’re gonna get that back?”

Bass shakes his head, equally bemused. “Who knows, brother? I guess we’re the man now, and there’s always people out there who are going to push back against that.”

“Can’t they push back another day?” Miles moans pathetically as he flicks to the back page of Neville’s exhaustive report. “Fine. I’ll head out there. After I’m done celebrating my birthday,” he says, lifting his head to smirk at Nora.

“Why don’t the two of you go out drinking tomorrow night? Just the two of you - the way you used to?” she blurts, shocked at just how much she needs them to rebuild their relationship.

They look at each other, and then Miles turns back to her. “You could come with, babe. We’d have fun, the three of us.”

Bass smiles wide in agreement, and its the most fake smile she’s ever seen him use, so she sticks to her guns. “I’d love too, but Mia’s coming back into town sometime tomorrow and I haven’t seen her in months, so I should probably try to cook her dinner or something.

Miles eyes her in a way that suggests he can think of a thousand alternatives to that plan, but can’t be bothered calling her on her bullshit. Bass is less subtle.

“Family’s family, Miles. Let’s do this the old-fashioned way - me and you and a shitload of booze.”

Nora rolls her eyes even as she laughs at the President’s enthusiasm. “I hate to think. Go on, Miles. Here’s your chance to get messy with Bass, without even the slightest word from me. No nagging Nora,” she teases, and they laugh together, delighted.

  
*  


_No. No, no, no, no, no. Not this. Please not this. I can’t bear it, I can’t …._

She feels the explosion.

Mia is practically falling asleep over her dinner, too many miles under her belt that day to keep her eyes open any longer. “Go to bed,” Nora urges, suspecting even the fire-warmed water she had ready for Mia’s bath wouldn’t make the cut tonight. 

“I might -”

Huh, no pressure drop, is the first thing Nora thinks. Then the terror sets in, as she realises no pressure drop means the explosion can’t have been that close, and to rattle the plates on the table like that, the glass in the windows …

It must have been huge. 

There should be sirens, shocked news reports, ambulances and firetrucks and police screaming to the incident, but that’s all gone with the electricity. Nothing remains except the quiet sobs of the victims, the stony silences and haunted eyes, underscored by the clatter of hooves and the occasional bark of orders from some militia functionary. 

Nora and Mia bolt out into the street and follow the stream of terrified people into the shell-shocked night. O’Casey’s, Nora registers. Where the Militia drink.

Sean O’Casey makes his own version of Guinness, she remembers Miles telling Bass at breakfast. He planned to start with the black stuff. Bass had wrinkled up his nose and said he’d stick to the old man’s collection of Irish whiskies. But no arguments about O’Casey’s. 

They’re pulling out the bodies when she and Mia arrive.

  
*  


“Whoever it was knew we’d be there, but not exactly where in the room,” Bass runs his mouth like a machinegun, shooting frantic glances towards the bed as the surgeon works on Miles. “Counts out one of the guards, or O’Casey and his girl, though I’ll bring ‘em in anyway. Might not even know they know something.”

Nora wants to beg him to shut up - he’s been at this for hours, filling the fraught atmosphere with a constant post-mortem of the evening’s events, going over it again and again as if understanding what had happened can help somehow help Miles. Maybe Death itself will object to the ceaseless chatter, Nora thinks sourly. More likely that Miles will rouse himself just to tell Bass to shut the fuck up.

Another part of her hopes someone is writing all this down. Even paralysed with grief, Monroe is a trained soldier, his mind supplying all sorts of little details that her bounty hunter’s gut tells her will be useful. Not tonight, or tomorrow, but after that, when Miles is out of danger … she’ll find these bastards, if it’s the last thing she does. And when she does, she’s going to hand them over to Monroe to deal with, and God help them, because he’s not alright. He hasn’t even let a nurse near him to tend his own cuts and bruises, just roared at them to focus on Miles, to save Miles, and leave him to spiral into the abyss.

She tries to bring him back, to get him to wipe the blood off his face, to sit down, to eat something, but he simply looks through her, paces past her, raves more intensely.

Miles is a dark, blood-spattered shape in the big bed, mostly obscured by the white-coated doctors and nurses orbiting him, stitching and clamping and whispering. None of them have been brave enough to offer a prognosis yet, the head injury competing with the blood loss for the honor of killing him first. They are still plucking nails and small pieces of aluminium from his feet and legs; each foreign body increasing the likelihood that infection will set in.

Nora is blindsided by her own terror at the thought of losing him.

The last time this had happened, it’d been a scant few months after they’d thrown caution to the wind and fallen into each other in the early days of the Republic. She’d still been angry with him, and the idea of trusting him with her heart was laughable. He was a monster, and she was a stupid girl with a weakness.

This time she knows he’s much more than that. He’s broken her heart more than once, but he’s mended it too, put it back together with gentle hands and unflagging respect. He’s an asshole, but she’s done pretending he’s not her asshole.

In the long, excruciating days of waiting for Miles to wake up, she and Bass thrash out a plan to root out every last Rebel in the Republic. Take the fight to them, the President hisses, his blue eyes hot with fury. Riddle their bodies with nails and the chopped up remains of tin cans.

“Kill them all,” he tells creepy Corporal Strausser, and her conscience is so deadened that the order makes her smile.

Miles wakes up three weeks after the night of the explosion. Too stubborn to die, the doctors officially conclude, and he’s still Miles enough to pull a face. Bass and Nora bring him up to speed on what they think had happened - a mole in Independence Hall passing on their plans about a crackdown, and the Rebels deciding to move first - and what they’ve done to combat it.

Bass had given the order for every carpenter in Philadelphia to start work on coffins. Nothing fancy - rough cut pine coffins. Of all sizes, he’d said coolly. Pile them in the square so people can see what happens to Rebels.

_Why couldn’t I, why didn’t I, I could have stopped it, he might have listened back then, but I didn’t say a word …_

Miles ignores everyone’s advice and forces himself to his feet just days after he opened his eyes again. “Just to the window and back,” he snaps when Nora remonstrates with him, rolling his eyes when she insists on hovering at his elbow. His leg is still puffy, the infection fought on a day to day basis, and the pain medication leaves his brain clouded.

Maybe that’s why the famously stonefaced General Matheson is incapable of hiding his shock when he sees the coffins lined up in the square below.

“What the fuck?”

“I want the city to see what will happen to Rebels. To their wives, and their children.”

Miles stares at his President with his jaw agape.

“On what grounds? Have you gone mad?”

Nora forgets to breathe when Monroe’s head jerks up, mouth working with fury. It had been a joke, they all knew that, but … Bass hadn’t been himself lately. If she’d thought the harder, colder Monroe she’d met on arriving in Philadelphia four years ago was a shock, the man he’d become since the bombing was a terrifying mishmash of paranoia and cold rage. It’s the latter that she hears now, that soft, silken voice of a men in complete control - right up until he puts a bullet in your head for daring to question him. 

“I’ve outlawed writings by any known Rebel, association with known Rebels, and possession of old US flags and generally inflammatory political literature.”

“Bass, this is … “ Miles breaks off his sentence, dumbfounded by the weight of the changes that had occurred in the days since the attempt on their lives.

“Necessary. Proportional,” Monroe insists, his tone icy and dangerous. Nora holds her breath, wishing she’d thought to warn Miles, praying he won’t object too strenuously. She’s stunned when they simply lock eyes, then Miles shrugs.

“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” he pronounces, then shuffles back to bed.

  
*  


She comes down for breakfast a week later, and finds them waiting for her in full uniform. There’s a bunch of other people in the room too - Neville and Faber, and a handful of militia guards she doesn’t know. Had she somehow forgotten a meeting in all the stress?

Nora’s frowning into her cup of coffee when Monroe clears his throat and she swings around questioningly. Was there a report she was supposed to deliver? Please God, don’t let there have been a report -

“Nora Clayton, you are under arrest for the attempted murder of Miles Matheson and Sebastian Monroe, and the murder of Rachel Matheson,” Bass says with a completely straight face.

She waits for the punchline, the gotcha, but it never comes. Still, it can’t really be happening, it’s some sort of elaborate stunt, they’re using her to bait a trap or something — but Miles won’t look at her, his jaw seemingly carved from stone.

“Miles?” she cries out as the guards drag her from the room, and later, when she’s accepted the dark and the stench that leaves her huddled in the corner for hours, retching, she’s still thinking his name, crying really, but without any sound.

But eventually, she runs out of tears, and fanciful explanations, and anything but the truth.

He thinks she is the sort of person who can lie with a man in the morning and plot his murder that night. He thinks her loyalty to him is somehow a sham. He can’t believe that, not truly, and know that she loves him.

Or - he simply didn’t care enough to wonder. Because what had been a self-evident truth to her, as powerful and irresistible as the moon herself, had been something General Matheson shied away from. Even his tender words in the depths of the night were of sensual things, the taste of her skin or the softness of her thighs. Love, she remembers him saying, was nothing but a liability.

One that he had refused to allow himself. So here she was.

Nora, heartsick, and scared out of her mind.


	9. June 2023

_June 10, 2023: Chicago, The Monroe Republic._

Nora - no, Susannah, she’s Susannah now - drifts around the bar of the Grand swiping at beer spills and scatters of peanut husks and trying to be grateful.

Grateful, dammit, she growls at herself. She’s alive, she’s free, and she’s only thrown up twice today. Frank will be proud.

“How’s my little fighter?” he likes to coo at her belly, and it takes everything she has not to yell the truth at him, or to dissolve into tears.

She’s begging her baby not to be a boy, and the last thing she wants for her is to be a fighter. At least Frank will shut up about it if the baby turns out to be a girl - he doesn’t even realise the two aren’t mutually exclusive. But Nora isn’t about to tell him, just like he’ll never know just who fathered her child.

No, not Nora. Susannah. Nora died five months ago, waiting for the firing squad, bracing herself to stare into the face of the man she loved as he gave the order to fire. She smiles sadly at the knowledge he would never have offered her a blindfold; he respected her too much for that. Was that all they had, in the end? Was it respect that made him pay her guards to smuggle her out in the dead of night and leave her on the edge of town with a packet of papers, a pouch of diamonds and her favorite leather coat?

Nora, she knows, would block it all out, put it in the past and move on, but she’s not Nora anymore, she taunts herself. Maybe Susannah is the type of person to torture herself with it, the endless circle of things they’d done and never said, said and never done. Susannah Dean, she’d read, wracking her brains for where she’d heard that name before. Surely Miles wouldn’t give her the identity of someone they actually knew? 

It’s not until she’s staring at a tatty paperback she’d picked up at a general store in Middle of Nowhere, Canada, that it comes to her. One of those Stephen King books Miles was so fond of - she doesn’t remember the name, but it had been an confusing jumble of demons and magic and damaged people. Susannah as much of any of them, good and evil and crazy and sane all wrapped up together. A survivor, Miles had said at the time. “Little bit crazy, but a real strong woman too.”

And now he’s decided that’s her fate too, and the name tastes like ashes in her mouth as she tries to build another woman’s life, with another man, and a thousand conflicting memories of the one who’d left a baby in her belly. Their paths can never cross again, she knows that, and he can’t accuse her of keeping the truth from him - she was already on the run when the lack of anything resembling her menses brought back the sudden, unwelcome memory of just how frantic things had gotten that night, their usual precautions overlooked in the storm of raw need. But every time their child kicks, every time she feels it turn circles inside of her, she has to bite down on the urge to head straight for Philadelphia and pull his hand to her swollen belly.

Instead, she shares those moments with Frank, and tries not to hate him for it. He’s sweet and unassuming and desperate to please her, all warm hands and gentle, considerate touches. Every time she is tempted to close her eyes and think of Miles, she makes herself focus on the adoring look in his green eyes, or the spray of freckles across broad, workman’s shoulders. He’d never swung a sword, and while his huge hams of hands could probably do some damage if they wanted to, he had no idea how to actually use them. She could love him for that, Nora knows, love him for that good heart and peacemaker’s instinct. All she has to do is give herself the time to forget.

And then the city erupts.

The rumors coming in from Philadelphia are so foreign to everything the Republic is built on that most people dismiss them as fiction at first. Susannah Dean shrugs her shoulders and perfects the idle curiosity of the bored; inside her, Nora Clayton’s heart hammers in dread. Some sort of coup, the first stories had said, and then names to go with it. The loyal - Baker, Neville, Faber - and the traitors. Hudson. Shaw. Matheson himself.

Susannah complains that the problem with working in a bar is that she never gets to go out, and she and Frank end up at a card hall down the road where the buy in for poker is considerably higher than they’re used to. Frank blinks in astonishment when she pulls out a pouch of diamonds for her stake, then proceeds to lose steadily all night. Militia boys, she warbles, are just so damned smart. (Talkative, too.)

They come back the following Friday, and there are first hand reports to add to friend-of-a-friend accounts. Matheson had pulled a gun on Monroe, a green boy called Tully tells them. He’d been stationed on main stairs at the time - even heard the gunshot, and Monroe’s should of pain. The Hall had gone into total lockdown after, but everyone knew Matheson was smoke. No point even looking for him.

“So does that mean the President is dead?” a trader from the Ozarks asks, the whole table hanging on Tully’s answer. Susannah widens her eyes and leans forward with the rest, but Nora already knows what happened. Doubts there was ever a gunshot, in fact.

Wonders if he was even able to raise the gun.

Chicago, always less than law-abiding, becomes a hellhole practically overnight. With the militia’s Commanding General gone AWOL, the gangs are keen to test just how much the local militia commander will put up with before sending in his troops; not much, it turns out, with the garrison commander flooding the streets with touchy, disillusioned soldiers. Susannah begs Frank to stay home (after all, what’s left to find out?) but he’s grown to like the smoky little backrooms and their high-stakes games, and fancies himself as a gambler.

And then he starts to win.

She finds him in an alley, four militia men still bent over him, hurling threats into his red-pulped face. Nora breaks into a jog, belly bouncing in front of her like a low-slung basketball, scooping up a fence paling as she goes, swinging it at the largest man’s head. He goes down like a sack of bricks, but the next man knows not to underestimate her. He’s quicker on his feet, too, dodging and swerving until he puts his head down and charges her, knocking her to the ground.

His fists are nothing, really, cracking across her cheek bone and under her chin and slamming into her sternum to steal her breath. But his boots, and the other men, jeering and hooting as they aim their kicks at her swollen belly …

It was a boy, Nora thinks dumbly as she holds the tiny little body in her arms the next day. Barely a baby, slipping from her body without a sound, life already snuffed out. His tiny hands are too small to tell how he would have held a sword, or been dextrous enough to piece together the various elements of a bomb. Perhaps he would have been a peacemaker, Nora thinks, or perhaps blood would tell.

He’ll never have the chance, now, thanks to his father’s militia.

She has a name for him. She refuses to let it leave her tongue, because saying it would make him real, that scrap of never-lived history, born of a love that she should never have allowed to exist. But when the time comes, all her hate and remonstrations and stomach-curdling guilt mean nothing in the face of the dirge in her head: Clayton Miles Matheson, Clayton Miles Matheson, Clayton Miles Matheson. The silent scream leaves her on her knees in the sand at the edge of the lake, but when she’s done, when he’s named and mourned and relinquished to death, she can breathe again.

When the world stops spinning, she places him in a little wooden dinghy she had stolen, harsh edges made soft by a fluffy flannel bedsheet she will miss come winter, and builds a pyre around his tiny, half-formed body. The blaze is fierce, lighting a path out onto the dark inland sea, and even then, the hurt still throbbing raw, she knows this is her fuse. This is the ignition of something new. He is the fuel, and she will be the flame.

There will be no more babies like this, she vows. No more children lost to the mindless viciousness of farmboys turned soldiers. No more casual tyranny, no more easy, convenient death.

She’ll destroy the militia - and the Monroe Republic - with her last breath if she has to.

  
*  


_Is this her last breath? Has she failed? They’d come so close, her Rebels, marched right up to Philadelphia’s gates with Georgia at their backs, the militia falling in front of them. And then she proves the weak link in the chain, Miles throwing away their chance just to get her back./p > _

_And Monroe._

_He’d done something far worse. He’d reminded her this enemy had been a friend first; this man monstering her with his beard caught on her hair had been someone she had laughed with, and shared sorrow. And then he’d dressed her in almost-transparent slip, a cheap mockery of Miles’ birthday surprise, and shown her just how close terror is to arousal, and how humiliating that is._

_And she’d seen him, glimpsed him through the pipework first, saving Charlie’s life. And the hate, the hate she’d worked so hard to find, had dissolved for a moment in a rush of gratitude. Not enough to stop her fury when Miles beckons him over to their side, not enough to want to trust him, but enough that it betrays her vow._

_She was a Rebel. Sworn to bring back the US, and bring down the Monroe Republic._

_Who were here to turn the power back on._

_As were they._

_So who the hell had killed her?_

_She’ll never know. She accepts that. But Miles, and Charlie, Aaron, Rachel…_

_Please God they’ll make it out._

 _Then kick some ass, and maybe even do it for her._  
*  


She makes contact on a Tuesday, and doesn’t even make the weekend before karma slaps her in the face. A dark shape up the end of her bar, face turned into his glass until he glances up to slide casual eyes over her. “Whiskey. Whatever you’ve got.”

Susannah wants to plunge a knife into him every bit as much as Nora does, but she’s just as good at pretending, too. So she reaches for their nastiest rotgut and pours it into his glass with a flourish. “No credit - payment up front,” she says bluntly, hand out, then makes an attempt at a smile when he scratches in the pocket of his long overcoat.

“Nup - no Trade Dollars. Republic’s gone to shit, don’t you know? Diamonds or gold only,” she says shortly, then smiles sweetly in response to his black stare.

“Gone to shit, huh?” he rasps, then pours a scatter of diamonds into her hand. “For that you give me the bottle.”

Nora shrugs, happy for Miles to put holes in his stomach lining if he must. She tries to think how Susannah would react in this situation, then realises he’s just another drunk in a bar. Beneath her notice.

She ignores him until closing time.

“Them that’s staying, get upstairs. Them that’s going, you’ve got ten minutes before I lock that door and charge you room rates.”

She collects a tray full of glasses, wipes down the bar and mops the floor before following him up the stairs.

“How’d you know which room I was in?”

“Three guests, two of which have been here a month. Wonder how I knew?” she sneers. “You’re not that good at hiding, Miles.”

“Stu.”

“Of course you are. What the fuck are you doing here, Stu?”

“Gee, Susannah, I don’t know. Maybe I need a place to lie low for a while, and this is it?”

She wants to say something about Monroe, and what it must have done to Miles to turn on him, but she can’t. The wounds are too fresh.

So she hurls her anger and pain at him instead.

“So I’m just supposed to work around you - to look at you every day when you turned your freaking back on me?”

“I got you out.”

“Yeah. After I spent six days in that hole wondering whether you or Monroe would head up the fucking firing squad. Thinking about the way you touched me and I thought - well, whatever I thought, I was fucking wrong because you thought I could have turned around and tried to kill you, the next fucking day,” she spits, every word an armour-piercing bullet.

“How long did it take you to find out that I didn’t actually do it? Did you have to think about the fact that I had no reason to set that bomb? To kill your sister-in-law?”

He hadn’t been able to meet her eyes before, but now he lifts them to her face, almost apologetic.

“I didn’t.”

“What?”

“I never found out that you didn’t set that bomb. The evidence was pretty solid - found some papers in your office linking you with the Rebels, discussing timing for an attack. And the fact you’d told us to go out that night —” he shrugs, defending the chain of logic.

“So why did you get me out?”

He looks away, shoulders climbing up around his ears, voice defensive.

“Because it didn’t matter.”

“Huh?”

“It didn’t matter, Nora. Whatever you’d done, I wasn’t about to let you die.” He sounds so matterfact, so sure, that the part of her she’d thought dead shifts and uncoils, trying to clamber to it’s feet. She kicks it down.

“Besides, it got me thinking. What right did we have to live anyway, after the things we’d done? And then -” he shudders, and the desolation on his face makes it clear he’s thinking about Bass. “It all got so much worse.”

Nora - not Susannah, this isn’t her mess - closes her eyes for a moment, aghast. Her poor, battlescarred heart is torn apart by a swirl of emotions, pity and scorn and love and exasperation. In the end, though, rage wins.

“You fucking coward,” she spits at him.

“Things get bad - the tinpot dictator you put on the throne goes bad - and that’s what you do? You just opt out? Run? I mean, I knew you were a commitment phobe but really Miles?”

His face has collapsed in on itself, hollow cheeks below staring eyes in that death’s head of a face. “I tried to kill Bass, Nora! I pulled a gun on him. Had my finger on the trigger, and I tried to fire. I tried!”

“Well obviously there were a dozen people in the Republic better qualified to kill him than you,” she snarls. “Doesn’t it tell you something, the fact that you couldn’t?”

“It was Bass.”

“Yeah. Your best friend. Who you love more than anyone else on this Earth. I get it Miles. Trust me, I get it. And if you can’t see that’s exactly why you’re a coward, then I’m wasting my breath.”

His look of blank incomprehension forces her to continue.

“He was okay before this. Bit cruel, definitely hard, but not homicidal. If anything, that was you.”

Miles flinches, but Nora’s not done.

“And then the bombing happens. And Bass is out of his mind, worrying about you. Thinking we had lost you. The things we thought, the conspiracies we dreamed up - it was bad, Miles. I thought it was just our way of coping, but …” Nora trails off, knowing she has to bear some responsibility here. So tangled up in her own fear that she hadn’t seen Bass start to slip. “I don’t think Bass could cope, Miles. He was way past coping.”

“He doesn’t do well with losing people,”Miles says dully. 

“I guess after Shelly and the baby …”

“Not just Shelly. His parents and sisters, before the Blackout. That’s when it started.”

The full horror of the situation starts to dawn on Nora, and she wants to grab him by the shoulders and shake until his teeth rattle.

“And this is the man you left to try and run an entire country by himself.”

“Nora -”

She turns away, unable to overcome her disgust. “I can’t be here. I don’t even want to look at you. Be gone by tomorrow.”

His head rears up, and mulishness settles on his face. “Nup. This is my bolthole. You want to walk out, be my guest. Now that I’m here we aren’t going to need help behind the bar anyway.”

She stares at him uncomprehendingly, and he rolls his eyes before filling her in. “I own this place. Bought it years back in case I ever needed a place to lie low. When they arrested you, I told Mrs B you’d be coming, told her to give you a job. Didn’t realise I’d be so close behind you, or that it’d be such a fucking problem. In fact, I kinda thought --”

“No, Miles. Not going to happen. Ever again.”

His obvious confusion saps enough of her anger to help her explain.

“Six days, Miles. Six days I sat in that cell, hungry and scared and - heartbroken, okay? Thinking that you believed me capable of that sort of deceit, of sleeping with you and then setting a bomb to kill you. I don’t give a fuck about Presidents and Generals, but my boyfriend, my friend - I just wouldn’t. Loyalty matters to me, Miles. If I’m anything, I am loyal,” she growls.

“I remember Bass saying once that you owned me, that the Republic did, but that was never what it was about for me. I thought we were building something, thought we had something, and you … you never knew me at all.”

“When it came down to it, you had a choice between me and Bass and you chose Bass. I deserve someone who puts me first,” she says, spine stiffening as the truth of it settles in her bones.

“Goodbye, Miles.”

Her arms are hungry to hold him one more time, but Nora Clayton knows her weaknesses, and Susannah Dean is her chance to divorce herself from them. She closes the door quietly behind her, returns her keys to the rack behind the counter, and slips out the back door.

She won’t be back. This chapter of her life is done.

  
*  


_What would they call the book of her life? The things that loomed large now, would they be a chapter to anyone else? Or just a collection of stray sentences, a footnote maybe. In the end, what would be stand proud and ring true in The Book of Nora? She’d grown up ignorant, scorning her Mama, who’d died to protect her. Too smart for her own good, caught in her little academic world that meant fuck all post the Blackout. Gone dark for a while, as the world went dark. Survived._

_And those years in Philadelphia? Trying to build a country, doing their best, even when it started to crumble around them? Four short years, and surely there had been good with the bad, her soul protests. We changed the world! She can only soothe herself now, comfort herself, so she decides to be kind, and proud._  


_You walked with giants, Nora. You loved, and lost, but my God, Nora. Dios Mio. You stuck to your guns, and stayed true to what you believed in, her heart swells._

_Even after he tapped you on the shoulder that day. That so-called rescue, the beginning of the end. The path that led you here._

_Could you have walked it any other way? Would you?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The remaining two chapters will be posted tomorrow - my apologies. I encountered a formatting disaster at 1am and did not have sufficient brainpower to fix it :D Thanks for reading and come back soon!


	10. May 2027

_May 5, 2027: Prison camp, near Braidwood, The Monroe Republic_

She’s fiddling with her irons, trying to make them look more convincingly secure, when the hand lands on her shoulder. It’s warm, and big, and the man behind her smells of whiskey and sweat and cold steel.

Mostly whiskey, Nora thinks, and warns him off with a growl. Warns herself, really, but now is not the time to examine why something so simple can make her ache for Miles Matheson. Whoever handsy dude is, his drinking problem probably saved his life - she’s unarmed, like the good fake prisoner she is, but he doesn’t have the benefit of knowing she’s just as dangerous without. So she tells him to keep his hands off.

Then she turns around and her nose isn’t playing tricks and this can’t be happening, not now, not when she’s got actual things to do and fuck, Miles Matheson is sending her the same smirk that she’d grown to hate two and a half years ago when she last kicked him to the curb. Staring at them from behind a tree ten feet away is a young girl who shines in the darkness like a flame at his back.

“Does it look like I need to be rescued?” she fumes, and tells him to crawl back into the bottle she knows he’s been living in ever since he left Bass. Not that it would make a difference, since Miles is more impressive dead drunk than most men are sober, but he just needs to leave. She’s found her equilibrium without him, and she needs him gone so she can be the Nora she’s forged in their time apart. He needs to be gone so that she’s not even tempted to beg: don’t pull me down, don’t drag me back in. Don’t make me love you again.

They argue about her so-called rescue, they argue about the plan, and when it all goes well, bar a slash under her ribs, they argue about the wide-eyed teenager who’d been a surprisingly big help in pulling it off. She’s family, he says, and Nora blinks, her burning resentment of the younger woman leaching away before she’d even had a chance to recognize it as good old sexual jealousy.

“You have family?” she asks, taking longer look at the girl, and yes, she can see the Matheson stamp on that face now. But it’s a blonde, glowing version, delicate where Miles is rough cut, and … Rachel’s children. She remembers the woman’s voice going all shaky, once, talking about her son and daughter, the family she’d left behind to come and engage with the mad men, as she’d put it. At the time, Nora had been more interested in how to persuade her to turn the power back on - “the minute we have power, they’ll let you go home, Rachel!” - but now she is face to face with the tragedy of it. This girl had been forced to grow up without a mother.

By Miles.

And the worst of it, as she cajoles them into making her a part of the plan, shames them into liberating the camp, browbeats Miles into helping deliver the sniper rifle to Father Nicolas … she grew up well. Strong, and smart and so moral it comes as a shock.

And quite obviously, with no clue of exactly who her uncle was, or had once been.

  
*  


_The thing about Miles is, you think you know him. You laugh with him, drink with him, crawl into his sleeping bag at night and learn to fuck as hard as you fight, and think you’ve see everything he is._

_You haven’t. Nora’s fairly sure nobody has. There are some dark, dark spaces in that man, not the obvious ones like his reliance on whiskey and his talent for ultraviolence, but the emotional traps. The black hole that stares back at you from behind his eyes._

_But the thing about those dark spaces, about not knowing who he is … it makes it easy for him to surprise you. When your expectations are low, anything short of nothing is impressive._

_And sometimes, madly, blindly, furiously, Miles comes through._

_And you can’t help but hating him a little bit for that, because that glimmer of hope is enough to keep you coming back, falling into his orbit, somehow convinced that maybe this time, Miles will be a good man._

_If not for you, for them. For her._

  
*  


“You’re back with Miles again? After what he did to you?”

Mia is incredulous, and Nora can’t deny she has a right to be. Her sister had spent entire nights collapsed on the ground outside her cell, refusing to leave lest the firing squad come for her before they’d had a chance to say goodbye. Even before then, she’d endured the ups and down of their loose, casual connection with the puffed up fury of your average mother cat. Miles, she’d always said, didn’t treat her right.

Nora had learned to agree, even though a spiteful part of her wanted to point to all the ways Miles knew exactly how to treat her. But that way lies madness, and it’s hard enough to contemplate leaving without bringing her sexual frustration into the equation.

“He got me out and he got you out, even if you were silly enough to go back,” she huffs, still annoyed at her sister’s veniality. Monroe paid too well to ignore his contracts, she’d argued at the time, and didn’t seem to hold a grudge against the Claytons. Besides, she hardly saw the man.

She tended to work with his underlings. Like Strausser, a dirty little voice whispers. And Baker.

But this is her baby sister, and she’d been asking about Dad from the start, saying they can find anyone they want, so why not him? And she can’t stop thinking of that last, huge fight they’d had, just weeks before things fell apart in Philadelphia. She still wonders if that’s why Mia refused to come with her, and chose to throw her lot in with Monroe instead.

“We’ve been over this, Mia. Galveston took it so hard - there was hardly anyone left alive there! And he had no family that we know about, and a few buddies from the Marines that we tried to track down but couldn’t find. We’ve got no new leads, nothing to follow up, and I have so much to do here - it’s Miles birthday next week! I haven’t even bought a dress yet,” she had snapped.

Mia’s blank face had yelled pure disgust.

“Yeah, because Miles’ birthday party is more important than finding your own family,” she had said, voice quiet with finality. “Newsflash, sis. They don’t care about you. Miles just keeps around for sex, and Bass kind of hates you. It’s like some sick addiction, Nora. Like you’re just begging for it all to blow up in your face.”

She’d slapped Mia, then, and the memory of her own outrage and hurt makes her want to scream now. Because Mia had proved her own personal Cassandra, fated to expose truths others refuse to believe. Miles had turned his back on her, and Bass had struck like a snake the minute she was vulnerable. The Republic, the Militia, those monsters she had helped to build? They hadn’t missed her, perfectly able of reaching new heights of destruction and repression without her. And she bears so much guilt, for so many things, but that just makes her feel stupid. How hadn’t she seen it?

She thinks she knows the answer, has inched herself around it’s sharp truth many times, but Mia is here to make sure it cuts her straight in two.

“How long did you hold out this time,” smirks Mia, and ”he’s not much for conversation,” and like some sick addiction ringing in her head, over and over again. Her memories of the Philadelphia years, she realises, have too little insight and too many maddening flashes of pure physicality, the feel of Miles driving away thought with his fingers, his mouth, his cock. Rationality had returned, sometimes, when she was alone with Bass, poking at cities on a map as if they were mere objects to be collected. He could be swayed, when she tried. Reasoned with.

And then Miles returned and she was happy to cede the floor, hand over the job of being the sane one, the cautious one, the careful one. Happy to turn herself into the person she never got a chance to be anymore, the Bounty Hunter, General Matheson’s favorite distraction. Downright delighted to lose herself in the taste and the feel and the smoky whiskey-death scent of him … she’d never been able to get enough.

How she hadn’t seen it before, she doesn’t know. Forget the whiskey, the cigars, the nights they’d lost to wild fucking under the influence of the poppy - her addiction was Miles Matheson himself. Every bit as dangerous and destructive as anything she’d ever cooked up, an explosion in human form.

She was an addict, and here she was, wandering along shoulder to shoulder with her fix. Both of them, in fact - Miles in one hand and a bomb in the other, so intertwined in her head she doesn’t know where one starts, and the other finishes. He’s all leashed menace and fury, and something else that’s even harder to resist. He actually cares about something - someone - again.

Not in the abstract, not in his usual Miles-Matheson-will-throw-away-his-life-to-preserve-yours way. That’s all very fetching, very Miles, but it doesn’t call on him to think, or to feel. It’s just what he does. This is something else, and it’s hacking away his armor to reveal things she’s never seen before. He’s looking at Charlie with a threeway blend of awe, annoyance and terror - not all that different, she supposes, from the way she looks at the girl. Charlie Matheson is so familiar when she stiffens her spine and glares at you, all dumb defiance, but then that face will soften, and she’ll apologise, and ask how she can help. So like Miles, and so utterly different, all at once.

Mia had watched them together, Nora and Charlie, and made some crack about her sister trying to replace her with a Matheson. Nora’s heart breaks in that moment, because it’s probably a little bit true, but there’s more to it than that. Every time she looks at Charlie, no matter how golden and glowing she is, Nora can’t help but think of another Matheson who’ll never grow to adulthood. Would he have been like this, little Clayton? So brave and uncompromising, a beacon in the darkness like his cousin Charlie?

“I’m not trying to replace anyone,” she says, but it’s not the most convincing truth ever told. Mia must hear the note of doubt in her voice, because she smiles, and when she pulls out the knife, it plunges straight to Nora’s heart.

“She’s not your family, I’m your family,” Mia pleads, and how can Nora say no in the face of logic like that? This was all about family, they’d made that clear, not about bringing down Monroe or ending the Republic. All Charlie and Miles wanted to do was get Danny back, and she can walk away from that, she owes Mia that. So she says yes, hugs Charlie and Aaron goodbye and fights the urge to kiss Miles until it blindsides her.

It’s a goodbye kiss, she tells herself, and lets herself fall into him for a long moment. To taste him, to memorise him, to stamp him on every cell of her body. This is the last time she’ll see him, the last hit she’ll ever take, so she savours it. Gulps it down.

Then she walks away, shoulder to shoulder with Mia, happy she’s made the right choice. 

  
*  


_Too many choices, she thrashes. Her ideals, or their survival. Atlanta, or Philadelphia. Miles, or … always Miles. Even when she knows she’ll never be his first choice._

_Following her heart, or doing what’s right._

_Leaving, or staying._

_No choice._

  
*  


Anthrax. They’re making fucking anthrax, and the Georgians will use the man just as willingly as Monroe ever did. The dread pools in Nora’s mouth, nasty as bile, and she exchanges a look with Charlie. She’s not sure the younger woman understands exactly what anthrax will do, but it doesn’t matter. Holding the man’s family hostage was enough to get Charlie Matheson on his side.

Not General Matheson, though. “You knew about this all along!” Charlie spits, and Nora shakes her head, the decision suddenly made. She can’t watch him turn back into General Matheson. She’s been down this path before and the rips in her soul still aren’t mended. Let Miles Matheson carry his own guilt this time; she’ll fight her good fight with someone else.

Maybe even Charlie. Her blue eyes had incredulous with disgustas she stared at Miles, but they’d been full of hope when they looked to her. The plan they sketch out is solid, even if they have to take Miles out of action. And they’re a good team, she’s discovered, as good as Nora and Miles ever were, just as synchronised and effective, with the obvious advantage of long hair and smooth skin and boobs to hoist up. She’s never been one not to use a weapon when it’s offered, so if a few smiles and a flick of her hair get her closer to the Captain and his crew than is sensible, smiles they’ll have. Georgia’s shiny new pistols work too, Nora smirks, Charlie’s mile-wide grin twice as bright behind cold steel as she announces a change in plan. Miles and Neville are locked away below, as safe as a master warlord and a conniving snake could ever be, and Jason Neville is putty in Charlie’s hands.

Nora is preconditioned not to be a big fan of any Neville, but watching Jason watch Charlie tugs at her heart a little bit. He’s all puppy eyes and earnest devotion, and Charlie’s flattered, and attracted, but too sensible to let go of her trust issues. What they really need to do is find a private corner of the boat and bang it out of their systems, because it’s pretty damn obvious he’ll never be enough for her. Jason’s a good soldier, and a tremendous physical specimen, but he’s not half the warrior she is, with that flaming Matheson heart.

It’s a recipe for disaster, that imbalance, Nora sighs, thinking of sweet, gentle Frank, who had backed away from her in horror after she beat down two militia soldiers to get to him. There won’t be many men out there who can match her, and fewer still who will love her for it.

After Dr Camp is reunited with his family, after the eleventh hour shootout, after Miles makes his about turn to save their asses, Nora swipes the bottle of rotgut from the captain’s cabin and she and Charlie head up onto the roof of the boat to watch the sunset.

“Can I give you some advice on your lovelife, Charlie?”

“Really don’t have a lovelife, but okay.”

“There’s going to be a lot of guys for you. Girls too, if you want that. But the thing is - keep it light. Casual - just sex, you know? Might seem callous at first, but otherwise - they will fall in love with you. And you’ll never want to, but you will hurt them. You won’t stay.”

Charlie makes a sound of protest, spluttering something about loyalty, but Nora cuts her off with a wave of her hand.

“It’s who you are, Charlie. Some people just aren’t made for that settled, domestic life. I’m not - and after Miles, I tried. I tried so hard, Charlie. You want to be, sometimes it hurts so much not being that person, but there’s something in you that demands more than just safe, just happy. You need this,” Nora says, nodding to the river and the horizon beyond. “It’s not just about the fight, it’s the freedom. Being your own captain.”

“Is that why you and Miles didn’t work out?” Charlie asks, watching Nora closely.

She sighs, and searches for some way of making sense of the carcrash that was Nora and Miles. “In one way. Though he wasn’t someone who needed to tie me down. It was … more complex than that.” Couldn’t exactly say ‘your uncle is an emotionally retarded megalomaniac,’ could she.

“We weren’t always healthy together, Charlie. Kind of fed each other’s worst impulses, and got a bit lost in it. Sometimes, there’s good, and then there’s too good. Addictive good.”

“Oh God, you’re talking about sex now,” Charlie pretended to gag. “But forgetting the Miles part, how can it be too good? Isn’t sex supposed to be like that?”

“There’s sex, Charlie, and then there’s good sex, and then there’s let the world burn sex. Go for the middle ground.”

Charlie’s eyes are wide as she takes another swig from the bottle. “O-kay then. So get in, get off, get out?”

Nora snorts, but can’t help agree. “Get in, get off, get out,” she confirms. “And I suggest you start by riding the Neville kid into the ground. Watching him pant after you is getting annoying. Let him down easy, though.”

Charlie looks up through a curtain of hair, her voice soft. “I really like him.”

“I know you do, sweetie. But he’ll never be enough for you, and he’ll spend his whole life letting you break his heart over and over again. There’s gonna be someone strong enough for you one day, Charlie, I promise. I don’t know when or where, but you’ll take one look and probably hate ‘em on sight, because it’s going to be you, just not. He will love all the things about you that scare other people away, and even if it doesn’t work out, even if it’s messy and complicated and he’s an asshole, he’ll always be your person. In your corner even when you don’t want him to be,” Nora finds herself ranting, the words tumbling over each other in a wave of pure emotion.

“Do you need to go and see Miles?”

“Fuck. I think I do.”

“Good talk, Nora.”

She puts it off until they’re back at base, and resigns herself to the fact this talk probably isn’t going to involve much talking. He’s in a bad mood from dealing with Neville, the iron door to his quarters slamming shut behind him as he stomps in and slings his gunbelt into the corner. There’s already whiskey in the glass before she lets him know she’s there, and he’s taken a second gulp before he registers the fact that she’s pulled his shirt on over her near-nakedness.

“You still leaving?” he asks, and she knows she should, knows that keeping the General at bay is something only he can do.

Knows he needs to know that.

“You want to a secret? You’re not such a bad guy, Miles Matheson. Promise I won’t tell anyone.”

And when she slides into his lap and lets him push the shirt off her shoulders, kneels up and lets him cut the panties from her hips, it’s not a reward, or a bribe for good behavior. It’s a surrender.

To herself. To who they are together. To letting the world burn, and rejoicing in it.

  
*  


_Yes, she was still leaving. Don’t you know the taste of goodbye, Miles?_

_”I can’t watch you die,” and it’s true, she’s not sure she could bear it, but it’s not the only truth. Every step on this path, every step closer to Bass, and he snaps tighter, swerves darker. A rabid dog, Miles called him. And yet, two minutes was all it took._

_Miles flicked his eyes up and to the left and Bass took out the threat and then we were prowling down the hallway together again, not a single word exchanged, no matter what he did to me._

_No matter how he used me._

_No matter how he broke me._

  
*  


There’s yet another pair of toughs, yet another hallway, yet another cold floor that slams up to meet her. Then they rip away the bag over her head, and it’s Bass.

General Monroe.

King of the Fucking World, if he had his way, Nora sneers. She tries to hide her disdain for the way he’s lording it over her, sprawled back on that chair, legs akimbo. How carefully did you pose that, Sebastian? Did you rehearse it? She takes a deep breath and reminds herself that impertinence can be a death sentence in the Monroe Republic. 

“Nora, what a pleasure to see you again,” he purrs, and her spine stiffens. So that’s how he’s going to play this. 

They yank her away again before they’ve made it past pleasantries, and she wonders why, until she remembers the way they used to do this. Miles is a straightforward torturer, piling on the pain until the subject breaks. Nora prefers subtlety and the lure of compassion. Bass - Bass loved mind games.

Of course the dress is white. Has he been stewing over this for the past five years? He must have known all along that she didn’t set that bomb, especially when Rachel hadn’t even been dead, but the fact that he framed her wouldn’t even register to him. He’ll think she betrayed him, escaping like that. Probably found a way to blame her for Miles’ desertion too. 

Is that how he’s able to justify this purely sexual menace, the dinner for two and passing too close, and fuck - is he sniffing her hair? Not where you’ll find traces of Miles, she wants to tell him, just to watch those blue eyes catch fire, but again. Death sentence. And he dares talk of being civilised.

Bonnie and Clyde, he calls them, the General and the Bounty Hunter, and Nora tells him she’s not that person anymore. Miles isn’t your General, either, she wants to say, but there’s only so many lies one can tell before they start to stink of truth. She need to turn the subject away from Miles, so Nora grabs the bottle of whiskey and swings it at his head.

He pins her to the dining table, chest hard against her back as he hisses in her ear. “In the weeks ahead, I want you to remember this moment. I tried to be nice.”

She does remember it. She plays it over and over in her head, and wonders if he genuinely expects her to regret it.

When they shove her face under water, the whiskey bottle shatters into a thousand pieces, giving her glass to cut.

When they drive their fists into every part of her body, she slashes the broken neck across his jugular.

When they pump her veins full of writhing snakes, it crashes into the back of his head, leaving a pulp.

“Ask her again,” he says, and she slams it into his face, crushing that patrician nose, slicing through those beautifully cut lips, obliterating those fireshine eyes.

It’s not enough.


	11. September 2027

_ _

 

_September 11, 2027: The Tower, Colorado_

Strange shapes loom shrieking from the mist as Nora clambers into the helicopter, body bruised and veins leaden with Sanborn’s drug cocktail. She can’t look at Miles, won’t look at anyone. She broke.

The helicopter blades sing her betrayal - broke, broke, broke - as it climbs into the sky, her dead eyes taking in the sort of panorama she’d never expected to see again. She catches Charlie’s face, mouth open with amazement, hand pressed tight in Jason Neville’s. ‘Get in, get off, get out’ obviously hadn’t worked, but they seem happy.

Happy is a lie, she wants to tell them, but her tongue is swollen and Charlie’s smile is 300 watts in the darkness.

It’s not until she’s crawling on the tarmac at their petrol stop that she realizes what Sanborn had meant. She’s as weak as a kitten, swinging her tiny claws at a full grown lion.

She closes her eyes to the sound of dead kittens miaowing her name.

  
*

“Miles,” she gasps as a rough hand shakes her awake. “What happened?”

The pilot is dead, there’s a helicopter to fix, and for some reason he thinks they’ve got a traitor in their midst. Just another day in the glorious life of Nora Clayton.

Nora pushes herself to her feet, twisting round to eye the dark corners every time she hears the snap of alligators.

  
*

The clean, white hallways feel like a fever dream, and the first time someone points one of those weird guns at her she smiles, sure it’s a hallucination. She snaps out of it pretty quick when they start firing, entire chunks of the wall crumbling with the impact. And that’s before things went crazy.

There’s Militia, and Rebels, and tower people, and Georgians, and outside, Neville declaring himself honestly for the first time in years - Team fucking Neville. She’s not sure who wants the power on or who wants to keep it off or who the hell is shooting at her anymore, because every part of her is focused on the bigger threat: Monroe. Her mind is still ringing with his voice - ask again, ask again, ask again - but there are tower people advancing up the hall and Bass has one of those big scifi guns, and Miles decides that’s grounds enough for a truce. Miles blinks, Bass fires, and they launch into the fray together.

Nora runs - she’s traumatised, not stupid - following them down the corridor until they burst through the first hatch they find and fling themselves around a corner only to pull up short above huge, open drains full of seething, churning water. There’s some sort of catwalk over the top, and Miles prods Bass out there first, then urges Nora to follow. She has a gun. She could kill him, she thinks urgently. That was always part of the plan.

Then bullets are ricocheting down the tunnel after them, and saving her own life is suddenly more important than taking his. There’s no choice but to jump, the icy water a cold fist to her gut, but it’s moving her away from the bullets, banging her against the edges of the tunnel until she’s finally able to wrap herself around a strut and pull herself out of the flow. She peers into the gloom, but … Miles. Bass. They’re gone.

She’s on her own.

Maybe it’s better that way, Nora thinks. Drug free. Guilt free. Washed clean of the past.

She could dive in, and let it take her to the outside, Nora thinks. Escape. Susannah again, or Carlota, or Anna. Anyone but Nora.

Because she knows what Nora would do, and she’s tired of always putting herself last. Tired of charging to the rescue, coming up with the plan, leading the assault. Nora, not scared.

She inches her way along the girder until the tiniest outline of light shows another hatch. She can’t push, not really, not without falling, but she leans against it, and gasps in shock when it actually moves. She leans again, and simply tumbles out.

Has to be a sign, she figures. Nora, back in the fight. Somewhere, far away, she can hear the strange booms of those big, round guns; she jogs towards them, staying low, staying out of sight.

Until she rounds a corner and practically falls over them.

Rachel inclines her brows, Aaron gives her a delighted grin, and Charlie rushes into her arms. Nora hugs her fiercely, Charlie’s joy at seeing her a balm to her soul. She’s done the right thing. Came back to the people who needed her.

Now to turn on the power.

  
*

She doesn’t even know what it is that’s killing her. The wound is a jagged hole in her belly - not a bullet hole, but a gash. Shrapnel, she’d guess, if there had been anything but chemicals in that little boobytrap she’d set. A piece of drywall, perhaps?

Whatever it is, she knows her lifeblood when she sees it. And it’s all over her hands, and Charlie’s, and Aaron’s.

“Go,” she’d had to tell him. Rachel was already gone, but Aaron, Aaron lingered with desperation in his eyes. He was too good a man to choose to leave her to die, so she has to make the choice for him. “Go,” she says. “It’s what you came for,” and it’s just her and Charlie left, her and Charlie, helluva a team, they could have ruled Philly together, could have ruled, better than anything Bass and Miles had ever managed …

Miles.

Miles is here.

She cries, turns away. She doesn’t want him to have to watch her die.

  
*

She doesn’t even feel his arms around her, anymore. Doesn’t need to fight, or even stay. She has regrets – sure, lots – but she’s wasted too much of her life regretting Miles Matheson. She’ll save that stab of pain for the blonde girl sobbing her heart out, and the sister she never got to say goodbye to. The child she’ll never get to have now.

Miles is shaking, holding her. She can feel his tears on her face, even if his words are a buzz somewhere beyond wherever she is. She’s left him so many times, this place is familiar, almost comfortable. The only difference is that this time, he’s begging her not to go.

But she’s Nora, not scared. Used to making the hard calls. Her speciality, even - get in there, blow shit up, and get out fast. Wait for the smoke to clear, and make a fresh start among the ruins.

There probably won’t be any more fresh starts, not for her, Nora knows.

She’s okay with that. She’s done her best.

“Rachel.”

She somehow croaks the name of the woman he loves, the woman he cheated on her with, the woman she’d supposedly killed out of spite, and Miles slows in his desperate shuffle, burnt coffee eyes frantic as they roam her face. She forces her bloody fingers up to his cheek and paints it with the tears she finds there.

“Go help Rachel,” she rasps, and tries to soften the demand with a smile.

“No,” he rasps. “I’m not leaving you.”

“She needs you, Miles.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

She has no breath left to object, no more fire, her fuse sputtered out. She tries to tell him that, to explain how she’s dead already, but her voice won’t work anymore, swallowed by the darkness that’s closing in. The ground rises up to meet them and he folds over her like a toppled building, imploding with his grief.

She forces her eyes up to his, already blind with tears, and blood rattles in her throat in protest of her attempt to speak. Nothing comes.

  
*

These are the ways she has said goodbye to Miles Matheson.

A hard thing, screams and shouts and rage ripping through her, hating him for doing this to her, for making her this person, for making her love him in spite of everything he is.

Quiet resignation, because she’d come to accept she’d only ever had a part of him. The smallest part, she suspected, after the chunk Bass owned and the slice Rachel had claimed. For years, she’d twisted on that particular spit, so torturous that being released from it felt like bliss.

The press of cold, numb fingers to his shaking, blood-streaked hand, salt tears on her face. His, not hers.

She’s somewhere else, her attention focused on the blast, body tight with anticipation.

Flame, fuse, fuel, ignition …

… Kaboom.

_fin_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A million thanks to iwilltry_tocarryon for her beautiful, beautiful art for this story :D


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